Post Mortem

John Mashek, a longtime political journalist, died earlier this week.

He covered presidential campaigns and conventions spanning four decades and was a panelist on televised presidential and vice presidential debates.

At a presidential debate in 1992, Mr. Mashek was best remembered for asking independent candidate H. Ross Perot about his proposed gasoline price increase, to which the jug-eared candidate responded with self-deprecating wit, "If there's a fairer way, then I'm all ears."

It was a big folksy hit with the audience, but audiences are fickle, and when Perot tried to use it again, it flopped.

In the 1988 debate Mr. Mashek asked then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had been suffering from heart problems, about the reservations of many in his party about the "qualifications and credentials" of gaffe-prone Sen. Dan Quayle (R-Ind.) as his running mate: "What do you see in him that others do not?"

Bush replied, "I see a man who is young, and I am putting my confidence in a whole generation of people that are in their 30s and in their 40s."

If you watch it here, it's a mighty uncomfortable moment:

The future president apparently did not take Mr. Mashek's question too personally, or if he did, the passage of time smoothed things over. Mr. Mashek's widow told me the former president called her to express his condolences.

Actress and director Penny Marshall, best known for her role as Laverne DeFazio on the 1970's hit TV show, "Laverne & Shirley," has been diagnosed with a brain tumor, according to the National Enquirer.

Ms. Marshall, 66, underwent brain surgery at a New York Hospital on Oct. 30, after falling ill on her way to New York. The Bronx native was planning on being in Manhattan to see her favorite baseball team, the Yankees, in the playoffs.

Entertainment Tonight is reporting that Ms. Marshall is "doing fine" after spending a short time in the hospital.

After starring on TV, Ms. Marshall went on to become a successful movie producer and director. Some of the films she directed include "Big," (1988), "Awakenings" (1990), and "A League of Their Own" (1992).

She directed her daughter, Tracy Reiner, whose father is Ms. Marshall's ex-husband, actor and director Rob Reiner, in "A Leauge of Their Own."

Good morning.

Two good obits from my old college town:
Jean Marie Fellin had one of the most interesting nursing gigs imaginable -- she worked the racetrack in Milwaukee and for about 10 years worked at the Indianapolis 500. And Myron Gordon, the judge who presided over the case of the Milwaukee 14, a group of protesters against the Vietnam War who broke into the Selective Service office in Milwaukee and destroyed draft records.

Port Townsend, Wash. is a thriving, picturesque town on the Olympic peninsula in the far Northwest. It's also a center for the arts, and for that, the Seattle Times says, you can thank Joseph Wheeler.

Down the coast in the hilly San Francisco area, Bill Provines spent three years as an engineer on the crookedest railroad in the world. There were 281 curves in the 8 1/4-mile line from Mill Valley to the top of Mount Tamalpais - "more than 42 complete circles," Mr. Provines liked to point out.

Jim Edelman, menswear buyer at Macy's, a powerful retail official who many considered the dean of tailored menswear, has died. We'd like a bit more about how he came to dominate the rag trade, but we take what we can get.

T. Rees Shapiro, a contributor the obit desk, just wrote the obituary for Francisco Ayala, one of Spain's most celebrated writers. Mr. Ayala died Nov. 3 at his home in Madrid at 103.

Shapiro writes:
Francisco Ayala was part of a generation of exiled Spanish writers, including Federico Garcia Lorca, whose works reflected the violence they witnessed during the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco's dictatorship.

Mr. Ayala wrote more than 50 novels, short stories and essays commenting on his life in exile and the suffering in his country under Franco's rule.

Mr. Ayala wrote dark tales of misery and oppresion fueled by dictators with unquenchable addictions for power. Critics called his works masterpeices of Hispanic literature, and spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero called him a symbol of the country's "moral reconstruction" during Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy.

The secret to Mr. Ayala's enduring success was mostly his genius but partly his longevity said Malcolm Compitello, head of the Spanish and Portuguese department at the University of Arizona. He said because Mr. Ayala outlived most of his fellow writers, he dominated the Spanish literary scene for a period of almost 25 years.

Mr. Ayala jokingly attributed his success and long life to two favorite vices: "honey and whiskey."

Good morning.

As readers of this blog know, but readers of the print newspaper do not, there were two major obits yesterday: French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and Nien Cheng, who wrote "Life and Death in Shanghai" about her ordeal during the Cultural Revolution in China.

All those athletes but hardly a word for the referees until now: Lou Filippo, World Boxing Hall of Famer who kept the matches clean, has died. He had been a boxer himself, with a record of 23-9-3 with 8 knockouts. As a ref, he appeared in the second, third, fourth and fifth installments of the "Rocky" films.

It's kind of hard to tell what Bill Hayes did for a living -- oh, here it is, he was an advertising agency owner -- but he appeared to have had quite a life. As this Amarillo, Texas columnist says: It's a good thing he authored a book, "Your Memory," on improving recall. Otherwise, he would have been in a world of hurt trying to remember just half of his 91 years."I've not achieved anything," he once stressed, "but I've just done a lot of things."

A man wearing a partial beekeeper's suit was found dead near a colony of tens of thousands of bees in Miami. It's not yet clear if he died from bee stings, a fall or another cause but neighbors told authorities they had been having problems with the beehive for the past 18 months.

The great historian and journalist Stanley Karnow once erroneously reported the death of Nien Cheng and her daughter, based on information from faulty sources in Hong Kong. She wasn't dead; she was in prison, held by Chinese Communists for six and half years. When she was released, she learned from her bankers that her circle of friends had already mourned her loss. She later autographed a book for Karnow with the inscription that essentially said, "Not dead yet."

So it was fitting that Mr. Karnow called Tuesday morning to report the death of Nien Cheng. She became internationally famous in 1987 after publication of her book "Life and Death in Shanghai," a harrowing and yet incredibly inspiring tale of how the relatively wealthy widow of a diplomat and oil company executive was targeted, harassed, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually triumphed over the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution in China. It's so good that other books of the same era are compared against it.

One of the threads of the narrative deals with her beloved daughter, her only child, and her worry and ultimate discovery of the young woman's death. Her book was dedicated to the daughter, and we have a lovely photograph of both of them that will run when the story hits print, in the next day or two.

Claude Levi-Strauss, the French social anthropologist who influenced generations of intellectuals with his ideas on culture and said the human species would become extinct, has died. He was 100.

For those of you for whom Levi-Strauss means denim, you should know he was one of the preeminent social anthropologists of the 20th century and whose erudite, often mind-bendingly labored studies of indigenous Brazilian tribes led to influential theories examining human behavior and culture

Mr. Lévi-Strauss was often paired with writers Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux as the towering French intellectuals of the last century. He said his life's work was "an attempt to show that there are laws of mythical thinking as strict and rigorous as you would find in the natural sciences."

He was best-known for popularizing a social science theory known as "structuralism," a philosophical method of approaching anthropology that identified behavioral codes that were crucial to the functioning of any society and that are inherent in the human mind.

For the Franophiles among us, here's Le Monde's version.

Good morning!

Venture capitalists played an outsized role in the Silicon Valley boom a decade ago and they're still out there, funding small businesses and coaxing new entrepreneurs along. Buddy Ruvelson was one of them, and perhaps one of the very first, according to this Minneapolis Star-Tribune story.

Stealing Bryan Marquard's lede, which should get you into this obit: Even if Robert H. Rines had never seen what he believed was the hulking hump of a creature break the surface of Scotland's Loch Ness, his life would have captured imaginations and filled a lengthy resume. Patents on his inventions number more than 80, including those for devices that sharpened the resolution of radar and sonar scanning. He founded Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire and helped push patent and intellectual property law into the legal spotlight. He taught at Harvard and MIT and, along with being a lawyer, had degrees in physics and microwave technology. He also composed music for Broadway and shared an Emmy for a show that ran on TV and the stage.

Jeremy Morris discovered one of the ground truths of preventing heart disease -- exercise -- by paying attention to London's double-decker bus drivers and postal workers. He gave up smoking and became a jogger himself, and died at age 99.

And on this side of the world, Dr. William E. Connor, 88, whose pioneering research helped Americans grasp the powerful links between diet and disease, died Oct. 25 in Portland, Oregon. Much of his work focused on how omega-3 fatty acids, such as fish oil, may help prevent heart attacks.

Ernest Levy survived *seven* Nazi concentration camps and when he finally was released, he became cantor of Scotland's largest synagogue. "When people ask me where God was in Belsen, I say He was there down in the dust with me," Levy said.

The obituary for Jim Hodges, a student of obits, appeared in the Quad-City (Iowa) Times today.

Uber-cost-saving retailer Wal-Mart has started selling caskets on its website. Yes, you read correctly. Caskets and urns to be exact.

It's actually not unheard of to sell caskets online. Wholesale retailer Costco also provides a similar service. But is it a little eerie that while shopping for, let's say, diapers, or perhaps, Christmas decorations, you also can order a casket, to be delivered within 48 hours?

And you never know, maybe you will qualify for free shipping.

According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, funeral homes must accept third party caskets so perhaps Wal-Mart has just made another brilliant business decision. After all, people are usually either buried in some sort of casket or cremated and placed in an urn.

And who doesn't love the convenience of shopping online?

Right now Wal-Mart offers 14 caskets and more than 20 urns. Caskets range in price from $895 for the "Lady de Guadalupe Steel Casket" to $2,899 for the Sienna Bronze Casket.

They even have clever names such as "Dad Remembered Steel Casket" or "Executive Priviledge Steel Casket."

We would love to hear what you think about Wal-Mart's latest move and if you would buy a casket, or urn, online.

Obit writers do mingle among the living from time to time. Perhaps it was someone's idea of a pre-Halloween joke, but I spoke last week at the private Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., to an audience of faculty members of students about the craft of writing obituaries.

With lots of teenagers in attendance -- who probably never read or care much about obits - I tried to make the speech as anecdotal and fun as possible. I spoke about how a lobbyist for despots lobbied me to do his own obit in advance and about the decisions we make in newsgathering in a complicated life. In short, some families still confuse obits for eulogies, and not everyone is happy when we include facts that are less-than-flattering.

The speech also gave me a chance to explain a brief history of how obits -- and the reputation of those who write them -- have developed over the years.

By the mid-19th century, the obituary form became well-established and had "quite a bit of clout with some prestige attached to it," obit historian Nigel Starck once told me. Establishment newspapers contained richly lyrical, often ornate obituaries about major figures of the day, from Queen Victoria of England to American bard Walt Whitman.

By the 1920s, a preference emerged for rat-a-tat newspaper prose that effectively buried the eloquent obituary form at most dailies. And as a result, Starck said, obituaries attracted a reputation as a practice ground for freshman journalists and punishment for the newsroom's drunks.

"The whole image of the paper changed to a quick, ephemeral fix, and the languid-style obit did not seem to suit that," he said. "So the prestige of the job went to pot until the obit revival of the 1980s."

He was referring to a series of mischievous-minded London obituary editors -- among them, James Ferguson of the new Independent newspaper and Hugh Massingberd of The Daily Telegraph. They ditched the starchy emphasis on burying leaders in politics, law and military and included more dead pop culture figures such as rock stars and Hollywood starlets. They also urged a witty, anecdotal approach that did not shy from noting a subject's often-unsavory eccentricities.