Archive: June 2008
Deaths Around the World
Not all hermits are wackos. Rolan Craig, a Coloradoan who died June 12 just days shy of her 110th birthday, could shoot, fish, ride horses, herd pigs and cows and "made the best peanut butter cookies in the world," said her great-granddaughter. From vacuum tubes to the Internet, this inventor...
By Patricia Sullivan | June 26, 2008; 11:10 AM ET | Comments (0)
How Do You Like Your Boy, Mr. Death?
and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death from "Buffalo Bill's," by e.e. cummings George Carlin, who died Sunday at age 71, was no Buffalo Bill, and vice versa, but for some reason I kept thinking of the famous e.e. cummings...
By Joe Holley | June 24, 2008; 2:40 PM ET | Comments (0)
Osama in the Obits
The constant tension between families who wish to see their dead relative's life through rose-colored glasses and those of us who insist on a more balanced report (yes, even in the obits) gives rise to some interesting discussions. I had one last week in which a bereft friend said "I...
By Patricia Sullivan | June 24, 2008; 10:59 AM ET | Comments (0)
What's a Handicap?
Purely by chance, our lead obituary and Local Life this week are about two people who overcame handicaps to accomplish remarkable things. The lead obituary is about baseball player Bert Shepard, who pitched for the original Washington Nationals in 1945, despite having had the lower part of his right leg...
By Matt Schudel | June 21, 2008; 11:44 PM ET | Comments (1)
Brief Lives
Brevity may indeed be the soul of wit, but don't tell that to a reporter. Working from the inflated notion that our words are sacrosanct, we're constantly battling editors demanding that we cut, cut, cut, even when we're compressing someone's life story into 20 inches or less. Although Post obits...
By Joe Holley | June 16, 2008; 10:27 AM ET | Comments (4)
Tim Russert
You tend to get a little jaded in this business, and it takes a lot to shock an obit writer. But yesterday afternoon, when we got word that Tim Russert had died, we -- and the entire staff of the Post -- were in complete shock and disbelief. The paper...
By Matt Schudel | June 14, 2008; 11:49 AM ET | Comments (5)
Tim Russert Dies
Meet the Press host Tim Russert died today. Our story online; we'll have a fuller story later....
By Patricia Sullivan | June 13, 2008; 3:50 PM ET | Comments (0)
Untidy Lives, Family Warfare
If you ever have too much of your perfectly happy extended family life, I invite you to sit a few days on a newspaper obituary desk. That almost-formulaic paragraph in most obits that starts "Survivors include..." can be a minefield and one should venture into it with extreme caution. I'm...
By Patricia Sullivan | June 12, 2008; 1:34 PM ET | Comments (3)
Feet First
For an obituary about Gilbert Hunt, a Princeton math genius and 1930s-era tennis prodigy, I went looking for a long-ago Post column about how the D.C. native occasionally played barefoot -- and entertained the gallery by picking up objects with his toes. In the course of my foray into the...
By Joe Holley | June 10, 2008; 5:36 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Synchronicity of F. Scott Fitzgerald
I had meant to post this blog item last Saturday, but I was too busy writing the obituary of ABC sportscaster Jim McKay. But, on the dubious theory that it's better late than never, I wanted to point out the odd occurrence of having two articles in The Post about...
By Matt Schudel | June 10, 2008; 11:37 AM ET | Comments (0)
Physician to JFK, LBJ Dies
Dr. James Morningstar Young, who rose out of a rural Ohio childhood to become White House physician to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, died Wednesday at Beth Israel Medical Center. Full story. And here's an obit of someone who served with Kennedy in the patrol torpedo boats during World War II....
By Patricia Sullivan | June 9, 2008; 10:29 AM ET | Comments (0)
Brits' Bad Behavior
My old colleague, Jim Ledbetter, did a nice little piece for Slate on how he sees obits after two years in London. He thinks the English versions are just "too frank, too judgmental, too, well ... mean" for American newspapers. (He's right.) Timothy Noah also opined a few years ago...
By Patricia Sullivan | June 6, 2008; 11:11 AM ET | Comments (2)
The Sixties Aren't Dead
Who would have figured that both Bo Diddley and Alton Kelley, the guy who helped start the whole hippie scene in San Francisco would have died within days of each other? Kelley, who drew iconic posters for rock and roll concerts in San Francisco, even drew a few for Diddley's...
By Patricia Sullivan | June 3, 2008; 4:52 PM ET | Comments (0)
Obiter v. Obiter
Alex Beam, a terrific columnist for the Boston Globe, takes on the obit world in a column today. Not sure who might care about all this but us handful of obit scribes. But for what it's worth, I know most of the people involved - I have attended both conferences...
By Adam Bernstein | June 3, 2008; 12:07 PM ET | Comments (0)
