Grim Reader, Sept. 10, 2010: John Kluge, Elizabeth Jenkins and Jerome McCabe
by Michael Schaffer
SEPTEMBER 10, 2010 TAGS:
It’s another slow week in celebrity death. Grim Reader, who tends to be superstitious about these things, suspects this means that fate is saving up for some kind of Obit bonanza. If you’re lining up to board a plane and happen to spot, say, Elizabeth Taylor, Britney Spears, or Dick Cheney milling around the gate area, this might be a good week to tear up your boarding pass.
.jpg)
In the meantime, there is a passel of obits for John Kluge, who the Wall Street Journal calls “a corporate cobbler” and who in the 1980s was among America’s richest. Kluge wasn’t actually in the shoe-repair business, mind you: he ran Metromedia, for a time the country’s largest collection of independent TV stations, known, according to Bloomberg, for “rerunning network situation comedies and low-budget movies.” He sold the stations for about $2 billion to what became the Fox network. But, using their bounty, he cobbled together an empire that included chain steakhouses, city busses, a lawnmower concern, and the Harlem Globetrotters. The obits disagree about where he stood on the rich list: The WSJ says he for a time was America’s richest; Bloomberg places his peak at number 2, behind Sam Walton. The New York Times and the Washington Post use less specific superlatives. Nearly all the obits mention his cheapness: He allegedly preferred leaving his outerwear in the car to tipping coat-check guys.
Jefferson Thomas’ obits are dominated by tales of a single year of his life: The one he spent as one of the first black children to integrate Little Rock Central High School. Though the AP recalls that Thomas was “fast and athletic and often played pickup basketball with white students” before the controversy, we actually learn little of what he was like as a young man. All the outlets treat the first death of a member of the Little Rock Nine as a chance to run a history lesson, something the UK’s Telegraph does best. We learn almost as little about the rest of Thomas’ life: He got a business degree, served in Vietnam, and worked in accounting for Mobil and the Defense Department. The Washington Post, though, offers a sobering view of the toll the school fight took on his family. His father lost his handyman’s job because of the controversy, and the family moved west right after graduation. “Thomas later recalled his family's journey to California as a scene of misery from the pages of John Steinbeck,” the obit reads.
Paul Conrad was an editorial cartoonist “in the tradition of Thomas Nast,” according to the New York Times. A classic: A 1968 drawing of California Gov. Ronald Reagan on his knees retrieving papers marked “law and order,” “patriotism,” and “individual liberty,” from under the feet of Alabama’s George Wallace. “You’re stepping on my lines,” the Republican icon tells the segregationist. Conrad spent much of his career at the Los Angeles Times, where an obit remembers the triple Pulitzer winner as “one of the leading political provocateurs of the second half of the 20th century.” But institutional interests perhaps get the better of headline writers, who talk up Conrad’s role in helping “bring The Times to national prominence,” which Grim Reader suspects wasn’t his major goal. Still, it’s better than Politico’s dreary lede, which explains that Conrad “was known for his scathing attacks on political figures,” a distinction that ought to apply to approximately 100 percent of political cartoonists. (Sadly, no one seems to have posted a gallery of his drawings).
Raimon Panikkar was “a Roman Catholic theologian whose embrace of Hindu scriptures and Buddhism made him an influential voice for promoting dialogue among the world’s religions,” says the New York Times. Panikkar made a 1950s trip to India where he encountered Christian monks who had embraced aspects of local religious practices. He returned to Europe to promote “an expansion of the Judaic and Greco-Roman foundations of Christianity to embrace the insights of non-Western religions.” An early version of the obit apparently hinted that such embraces had taken place well before Panikkar. The theologian’s dissertation, a correction helpfully explains, “compared the interpretation of the Brahma Sutras by the eighth-century Hindu philosopher Adi Sankara with the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, not with St. Thomas Aquinas's interpretation of the Brahma Sutras.” That’s a relief.
Also in the world of letters, Elizabeth Jenkins is remembered by the Guardian as “a novelist and biographer of exceptional quality” who according to the Telegraph had a knack for depicting “the victimization of sympathetic, if frail, protagonists by people around them who are unremarkable except for their cruelty.” At 104, Jenkins may be the last writer whose personal feuds with Virginia Woolf make the obit pages: Initially fascinated with Woolf’s smart circle of friends, she eventually decided that the writer—who’d dissed one of Jenkins’ books—was “appalling.”… And Vance Bourjaily, according to the Washington Post, was “a prolific novelist who explored the complex lives of contemporary Americans in reticently unadorned prose.” The obits all place Bourjaily with WWII-inflected novelists Norman Mailer and James Jones, though his biography seems more interesting: He was a jazz trumpeter, fly fisherman, Broadway critic, and Louisiana writing teacher, too. The NYT offers a possibly unintentional put-down to one of his other acts: “He was a founder of Discovery, a short-lived literary journal of some cachet,” the obit reads.
More cachet, or at least a longer life, attached itself to George Hitchcock’s literary journal, Kayak. Alas, the obits are just as interested in who he didn’t publish, or at least how he informed rejects that their work wasn’t Kayak material: In addition to the boilerplate note, he’d include archly cruel rejection slips: Victorian engravings depicting a beheading, or a mountain climber slipping into a crevasse, with a brush-off caption appended,” per the NYT. Everyone notes that the left-wing Hitchcock loved a good fight, but the San Jose Mercury News shows the sort of opponents he was willing to battle: Called before the red-scare House Un-American Activities Committee, he testified that “This hearing is a big bore and a waste of the public's money.”
Having a hard time finding kiddie crossbows at the toy store? Blame Edward Swartz, the crusading toy-safety lawyer the Boston Globe dubs “the Nader of the nursery.” Swartz “won multimillion-dollar judgments for clients injured by defective products ranging from little toy people to pools” but defended himself against charges of ambulance-chasing by noting that he annually released a list of most dangerous kids’ toys. (A profit-seeking lawyer wouldn’t focus on prevention, would he?) The real Nader is quoted in the obit: “Millions of parents have lost a great defender against the broadening variety of toys that expose children at a very young age to toxic harm, physical harm, or explosive harm,” he says. The Wall Street Journal lists some of Swartz’s unfavorites from last year’s list: “a Wall-E Foam Rocket Launcher, a Curious George counting book for infants, and a 30-inch Batman model that [Swartz’s organization] claimed presented a danger of blunt-force injuries.”
You’ve gotta love the prissy NYT lede on the obit of Robert Schimmel, “a comedian who specialized in taboo-breaking humor of the sexual and scatological variety.” Any hints as to the jokes? Luckily, Robbie Genet, writing at the Huffington Post, embeds some video that’s distinctly not safe for work, unless you work at a rectal thermometer manufacturing plant… A less controversial figure from the entertainment world was David Dotort, the creator of Bonanza, which the LAT calls “untraditional in its emphasis on relationships over violence” in a western. Dotort pushed to make the show about families, rather than gunslingers. But his biggest impact may have involved how people watched: The first color western, its lush photography spurred sales of color TVs, the paper says… The AP also remembers Cammie King Conlon, best known for a role she played at age 4: Scarlet and Brett’s daughter in Gone With the Wind. Conlon later voiced the animated Bambi.
.jpg)
Finally, a nice war-hero obit for Jerome McCabe, a survivor of the Korean War battle of the Chosin. “After four days and five nights of combat in temperatures that dipped to 35 degrees below zero, Jerome M. McCabe's toes were numb and black from frostbite,” begins the Washington Post’s dramatic lede. “His right arm and leg were bleeding from shrapnel wounds inflicted by a Chinese mortar round.” One quibble: The piece repeatedly refers to enemy troops in the disastrous battle by their government’s political orientation. As in: “Waiting out the cold in their quilted uniforms and fur hats, the communists opened fire.” Not necessarily inaccurate—though Grim Reader wouldn’t vouch for the ideological purity of some wartime conscript—but somehow just thinks “Chinese” would sound better.
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.
In the meantime, there is a passel of obits for John Kluge, who the Wall Street Journal calls “a corporate cobbler” and who in the 1980s was among America’s richest. Kluge wasn’t actually in the shoe-repair business, mind you: he ran Metromedia, for a time the country’s largest collection of independent TV stations, known, according to Bloomberg, for “rerunning network situation comedies and low-budget movies.” He sold the stations for about $2 billion to what became the Fox network. But, using their bounty, he cobbled together an empire that included chain steakhouses, city busses, a lawnmower concern, and the Harlem Globetrotters. The obits disagree about where he stood on the rich list: The WSJ says he for a time was America’s richest; Bloomberg places his peak at number 2, behind Sam Walton. The New York Times and the Washington Post use less specific superlatives. Nearly all the obits mention his cheapness: He allegedly preferred leaving his outerwear in the car to tipping coat-check guys.Jefferson Thomas’ obits are dominated by tales of a single year of his life: The one he spent as one of the first black children to integrate Little Rock Central High School. Though the AP recalls that Thomas was “fast and athletic and often played pickup basketball with white students” before the controversy, we actually learn little of what he was like as a young man. All the outlets treat the first death of a member of the Little Rock Nine as a chance to run a history lesson, something the UK’s Telegraph does best. We learn almost as little about the rest of Thomas’ life: He got a business degree, served in Vietnam, and worked in accounting for Mobil and the Defense Department. The Washington Post, though, offers a sobering view of the toll the school fight took on his family. His father lost his handyman’s job because of the controversy, and the family moved west right after graduation. “Thomas later recalled his family's journey to California as a scene of misery from the pages of John Steinbeck,” the obit reads.
Paul Conrad was an editorial cartoonist “in the tradition of Thomas Nast,” according to the New York Times. A classic: A 1968 drawing of California Gov. Ronald Reagan on his knees retrieving papers marked “law and order,” “patriotism,” and “individual liberty,” from under the feet of Alabama’s George Wallace. “You’re stepping on my lines,” the Republican icon tells the segregationist. Conrad spent much of his career at the Los Angeles Times, where an obit remembers the triple Pulitzer winner as “one of the leading political provocateurs of the second half of the 20th century.” But institutional interests perhaps get the better of headline writers, who talk up Conrad’s role in helping “bring The Times to national prominence,” which Grim Reader suspects wasn’t his major goal. Still, it’s better than Politico’s dreary lede, which explains that Conrad “was known for his scathing attacks on political figures,” a distinction that ought to apply to approximately 100 percent of political cartoonists. (Sadly, no one seems to have posted a gallery of his drawings).
Raimon Panikkar was “a Roman Catholic theologian whose embrace of Hindu scriptures and Buddhism made him an influential voice for promoting dialogue among the world’s religions,” says the New York Times. Panikkar made a 1950s trip to India where he encountered Christian monks who had embraced aspects of local religious practices. He returned to Europe to promote “an expansion of the Judaic and Greco-Roman foundations of Christianity to embrace the insights of non-Western religions.” An early version of the obit apparently hinted that such embraces had taken place well before Panikkar. The theologian’s dissertation, a correction helpfully explains, “compared the interpretation of the Brahma Sutras by the eighth-century Hindu philosopher Adi Sankara with the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, not with St. Thomas Aquinas's interpretation of the Brahma Sutras.” That’s a relief.
Also in the world of letters, Elizabeth Jenkins is remembered by the Guardian as “a novelist and biographer of exceptional quality” who according to the Telegraph had a knack for depicting “the victimization of sympathetic, if frail, protagonists by people around them who are unremarkable except for their cruelty.” At 104, Jenkins may be the last writer whose personal feuds with Virginia Woolf make the obit pages: Initially fascinated with Woolf’s smart circle of friends, she eventually decided that the writer—who’d dissed one of Jenkins’ books—was “appalling.”… And Vance Bourjaily, according to the Washington Post, was “a prolific novelist who explored the complex lives of contemporary Americans in reticently unadorned prose.” The obits all place Bourjaily with WWII-inflected novelists Norman Mailer and James Jones, though his biography seems more interesting: He was a jazz trumpeter, fly fisherman, Broadway critic, and Louisiana writing teacher, too. The NYT offers a possibly unintentional put-down to one of his other acts: “He was a founder of Discovery, a short-lived literary journal of some cachet,” the obit reads. More cachet, or at least a longer life, attached itself to George Hitchcock’s literary journal, Kayak. Alas, the obits are just as interested in who he didn’t publish, or at least how he informed rejects that their work wasn’t Kayak material: In addition to the boilerplate note, he’d include archly cruel rejection slips: Victorian engravings depicting a beheading, or a mountain climber slipping into a crevasse, with a brush-off caption appended,” per the NYT. Everyone notes that the left-wing Hitchcock loved a good fight, but the San Jose Mercury News shows the sort of opponents he was willing to battle: Called before the red-scare House Un-American Activities Committee, he testified that “This hearing is a big bore and a waste of the public's money.”
Having a hard time finding kiddie crossbows at the toy store? Blame Edward Swartz, the crusading toy-safety lawyer the Boston Globe dubs “the Nader of the nursery.” Swartz “won multimillion-dollar judgments for clients injured by defective products ranging from little toy people to pools” but defended himself against charges of ambulance-chasing by noting that he annually released a list of most dangerous kids’ toys. (A profit-seeking lawyer wouldn’t focus on prevention, would he?) The real Nader is quoted in the obit: “Millions of parents have lost a great defender against the broadening variety of toys that expose children at a very young age to toxic harm, physical harm, or explosive harm,” he says. The Wall Street Journal lists some of Swartz’s unfavorites from last year’s list: “a Wall-E Foam Rocket Launcher, a Curious George counting book for infants, and a 30-inch Batman model that [Swartz’s organization] claimed presented a danger of blunt-force injuries.”
You’ve gotta love the prissy NYT lede on the obit of Robert Schimmel, “a comedian who specialized in taboo-breaking humor of the sexual and scatological variety.” Any hints as to the jokes? Luckily, Robbie Genet, writing at the Huffington Post, embeds some video that’s distinctly not safe for work, unless you work at a rectal thermometer manufacturing plant… A less controversial figure from the entertainment world was David Dotort, the creator of Bonanza, which the LAT calls “untraditional in its emphasis on relationships over violence” in a western. Dotort pushed to make the show about families, rather than gunslingers. But his biggest impact may have involved how people watched: The first color western, its lush photography spurred sales of color TVs, the paper says… The AP also remembers Cammie King Conlon, best known for a role she played at age 4: Scarlet and Brett’s daughter in Gone With the Wind. Conlon later voiced the animated Bambi.
Finally, a nice war-hero obit for Jerome McCabe, a survivor of the Korean War battle of the Chosin. “After four days and five nights of combat in temperatures that dipped to 35 degrees below zero, Jerome M. McCabe's toes were numb and black from frostbite,” begins the Washington Post’s dramatic lede. “His right arm and leg were bleeding from shrapnel wounds inflicted by a Chinese mortar round.” One quibble: The piece repeatedly refers to enemy troops in the disastrous battle by their government’s political orientation. As in: “Waiting out the cold in their quilted uniforms and fur hats, the communists opened fire.” Not necessarily inaccurate—though Grim Reader wouldn’t vouch for the ideological purity of some wartime conscript—but somehow just thinks “Chinese” would sound better.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.
RELATED CONTENT
Latest News Delivered to Your Inbox - Sign up with our site and you will get the latest news about people and subjects that interest you.
