Lively Reading

Some of you will remember from “All Papered Up,” that I like to read the newspaper, and have since I was a kid. After that post, my daughter emailed me: “I can’t believe you didn’t mention your FAVORITE thing to read in the paper.” OK, so I’m confessing it here, but let’s keep it between us, OK?

I love to read obituaries. I know it sounds morbid, but I have strict rules governing my choices:

1.       No famous people. We all know what Steve Jobs did and that Zsa Zsa and Eva, between them, had enough husbands to field a football team.

2.       Cleverness counts. Extra points for funny. I like knowing that someone loved to garden in the nude or collected Pez Candy dispensers.

3.       Bitterness and anger are OK, if well written. One of these obits was so caustic, it made me curious about the deceased. “Could she have really been THAT bad?” I wondered.    

4.       But most important: “Is this a person I would like to know?” Surprisingly the answer is often yes. I’m struck by the number of capable, talented, fun-loving people there are/were in this world.

I chuckled at the woman described as a “professional clipper of coupons, baker of cookies, terror behind the wheel and ruthless card player,” who “loved her children relative to how clean-shaven they were.”

A man called a “happy hoaxer,” created the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, and clothed animals of all sizes, including a cow in a muumuu and a horse in Bermuda shorts.

The caustic obit I mentioned earlier says this, among other things: she “died . . . without family by her side due to burnt bridges and a wake of destruction in her path . . . . she did not want an obituary or anyone including family to know she died. That’s because even in death, she wanted those she terrorized to still be living in fear looking over their shoulders. So this isn’t so much an obituary but more of a public service announcement.” Wow! Some legacy!  

Here is a photo of Nanalee Allen Craig while she walked through a crowd of ogling Italian men which became a rallying cry for feminists worldwide. It’s title: “An America Girl in Italy” and it appeared in a 1952 Cosmopolitan Magazine essay about young women traveling alone—relatively rare at the time. Ironically she married the cousin of one of the men in the photo, who was an Italian count. She died at age 90, having been given “more free meals in Italian restaurants than you’ll ever know.”   

My all-time favorites, however, were ones written about Jim Sheeler, the Obit Editor of the now defunct Colorado Rocky Mountain News, and shown in this photo. Talk about a guy who made lemonade from lemons! I’m told the Obituary Desk is where they send old reporters to die. This man took on the task and elevated it to an art form. How fitting that a reporter who won a Pulitzer in 2006 should have not one, but several well-written tributes. My favorite was from the September, 2021, issue of Neiman Reports: “ . . . every story Sheeler wrote is a testament to the worth of everyone he wrote about, no matter their station in life.”

So I call my Old School hobby uplifting instead of morbid.