Grim Reader, May 13, 2011: Seve Ballesteros, Gunter Sachs and Joanna Russ

by Michael Schaffer

MAY 13, 2011 TAGS: OBITS, MEDIA ADD A COMMENT

Lots of dramatic descriptors populate the obituaries for golfer Seve Ballesteros. The New York Times calls him a “dashing golf champion” with a “swashbuckling style.” The Guardian cites his “magnetism and charisma.” Sports Illustrated hymns of his “handsome face and flamboyant game.” The Los Angeles Times, evoking a variety of natural force Grim Reader doesn’t quite recognize, calls him a “dashing, audacious force of golfing nature” before going on to note his “inarguable handsomeness, jet-black hair, dapper attire and unusual rations of verve and panache.” All of the obits go long on the Ballesteros legend -- though the Independent is considerate enough to label it as such: From a humble northern Spanish family, he was not to the golf course born. But in what the Los Angeles Times calls “a whoosh of precocity,” he established himself at age 19 as one of the favorite European players. The obits also note that he was never as popular in golf-mad America -- a fact reflected in the coverage, which is much more detailed in U.K. papers. The party-poopers at the Guardian, meanwhile, have the most detail on a facet of Ballesteros’ career that sports nostalgists tend to gloss over: That whoosh of precocity was mirrored by a long decline, when after 1986 his career went swiftly south.

Beware cousins in the military

The Independent and the Associated Press cover Lidia Gueiler Tejada’s death. Gueiler governed Bolivia for eight months in the late 1970s. In the process, she was the second woman to serve as a president in the Western world -- and the first one not to ascend, like Argentina’s Isabel Peron, by virtue of her husband’s death in office. “Gueiler was a life-long campaigner for human rights, not least for women, and against the arrogant, delusional military regimes that blighted not only Bolivia but most of Latin America through much of her life,” says the Independent. Fun fact: She was a cousin of Raquel Welch, whose father came to the United States from Bolivia. Less fun fact: The military man who ousted and exiled her was also a cousin. She later endorsed the country’s current left-leaving leader, Evo Morales.

A Cassandra in Detroit

The obits for former GM boss Robert Stempel might help console someone who’s just been sacked. Though most of the ledes note that he lasted just two rocky years atop the automaker, the bulk of the coverage focuses on Stempel’s early work on issues that currently vex the business -- notably environmental mitigation (he “led the development of the catalytic converter,” says the Associated Press’ lede) and fuel efficiency (the New York Times notes that he backed the electric car, whose demise later became the subject of a conspiratorial documentary). Everyone says that Stempel was a rare engineer to reach GM’s corner office, and though he presided over steep layoffs and market-share declines during the recession-racked early 1990s, the obits cast him as a Cassandra: “Hiis forward-looking projects couldn't counteract GM's image as a stodgy manufacturer of what Money magazine once called ‘fuel-thirsty luxobarges,’” explains the Wall Street Journal.

For peace and chocolate

Just a few weeks ago, Grim Reader noted the obits for Frank Buckles, the last American veteran of World War I. This week brings news that the last WWI combat vet, period, has died. Claude Choules watched from a British battleship as the German navy surrendered in 1918, according to a lengthy Associated Press obit. But where many obits in the last-surviving-veteran mold simply recount big history, this Choules obit actually does a good job with the actual person -- thanks, in great part, to the late veteran himself. In retirement, he took a creative writing class and ultimately penned a memoir, which was published two years ago. The tale also underlined the ways in which Choules defied expectations. “He refused to submit to his place in history, becoming a pacifist who would not march in parades commemorating wars like the one that made him famous,” the obit says. Of course, it wouldn’t be a write-up of a 110-year old if it didn’t include some advice on longevity. Choules, for what it’s worth, “liked to start each day with a bowl of porridge and occasionally indulged in his favorite treats: mango juice and chocolate.”

Exner ex

Grim Reader likes to lament the many times obits of women focus on their spouse. This week, two men get that treatment. William Campbell’s status as the first husband of JFK mistress Judith Campbell Exner makes paragraph one of his New York Times obit, alongside a mention of how Campbell was an actor “widely familiar to film and television audiences.” (Read on and you’ll find he was a recurring Star Trek figure, among other roles). … And the Associated Press ledes a Gunter Sachs obit with a paragraph-one mention of his brief marriage to Brigitte Bardot, alongside a reference to his “playboy lifestyle.” (Turn to the Telegraph for a longer look at “one of Europe’s most energetic playboys.” It turns out Ted Kennedy helped Sachs and Bardot marry in Las Vegas, and she later left him for Serge Gainsbourg. Killer Sachs quote: “Playboy, moi? I would rather call myself a gentleman.”)

More inclusive sex

There’s a good chance the language in this humble column was shaped by Kate Swift, whose obit shows up in the New York Times. Swift and her companion, Casey Miller, wrote two books about how sexism was embedded in the English language. The inspiration came while copy-editing a sex-ed textbook and finding it full of masculine pronouns. Not all of their suggestions -- like the gender-neutral pronoun “tey” -- made it into modern lingo. On the other hand, Grim Reader hasn’t referred to firemen or stewardesses much lately.

Seeing better

Willard Boyle won a physics Nobel prize in 2009 for an invention that was 40 years old -- the charge coupled device. What changed? Well, the CCD -- the “electronic eye in digital cameras — a photosensitive microchip that transforms light rays into digital images,” according to the Washington Post -- became the basis of a transformation that has revolutionized imaging, right down to the cellphone camera in your pocket. … And in science fiction, the New York Times has a great piece on Joanna Russ, who “helped deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen — women.” The author of The Female Man, Russ began writing at a time when sci-fi’s few women writers used male pseudonyms. “The science fiction writer has the privilege of remaking the world,” notes the Times’ Margalit Fox. “Because of this, the genre, especially in the hands of disenfranchised writers, has become a powerful vehicle for political commentary.” Russ, she says, was triply disenfranchised -- as a woman, a lesbian, and someone whose day job was in a university English department where profs generally looked down on genre fiction. Interestingly, the obit notes she’d been married, but leaves out the ex’s name.

Stage fury

Also this week, West Side Story script author Arthur Laurents was “an irascible eminence of musical theater,” according to the Washington Post, which accompanies the Broadway titan’s obit with a slideshow. A New York Post column plays up the irascible part, describing Laurents as a Jekyll-and-Hyde type (“Beast Side Story” is the inevitable headline) and quoting ex-friends about his rages: “When he turned on you -- and, in his long life, he turned on many of his friends sooner or later -- it was swift and brutal.”... John Walker is remembered as the US-born frontman for the Walker Brothers, who brought U.S.-style rock to the United Kingdom just as the British invasion was hitting America. Back home, says the Independent, “Walkermania was not far behind Beatlemania.”... And the New York Times describes Louis Stumberg as “the man who brought Tex-Mex to TV dinners.” Descended from Germans who migrated to San Antonio, Stumberg founded Patio Foods, now part of ConAgra and a titan in an increasingly Latino country.

Attack on the Swiss

Finally, there a couple of hilarious obits this week in the Telegraph. Swiss spymaster Albert Bachmann so feared a Communist threat to his neutral nation that, in the 1970s, he set up a secret Swiss base/gold vault in Ireland, organized a guerrilla force that would take to the mountains in case of invasion, and began spying on neighboring Austria’s military exercises (despite an invitation to watch the exercises as a guest). “By the time his plots and schemes were uncovered by an astonished commission of inquiry, he had reduced the Swiss military intelligence agency, in which he had mysteriously managed to rise to a senior role, to a state bordering on chaos, not to mention bankruptcy,” the obit reads. “So catastrophic was his impact that, when he was finally unmasked, many assumed he must be a double agent. He was not.”

Soul and calamity

Meanwhile, the Telegraph also calls Sir Lattimore Brown “perhaps the most unfortunate artist in the annals of soul music.” Among the indignities: Record deal with Otis Redding scuttled by Redding’s airplane-crash death; briefly successful nightclub career in Dallas undercut by arrest of the club’s owner, Jack Ruby; home lost to Katrina; various beatings, muggings, and stabbings; and more romantic calamity than Grim Reader can describe. He did have some minor hits in the 1960s and 1970s. “But wider recognition was not encouraged by the online All Music Guide's declaration that he had ‘retired from music in 1980 and passed away in Arkansas in the subsequent decade,’” the obit archly notes. Brown died after being hit by a car on the street in front of his new home in Florida.

Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.