Grim Reader, Sept 30, 2011: Wangari Maathai, Wilma Lee Cooper and Ines De Costa
by Michael Schaffer
SEPTEMBER 30, 2011 TAGS:
GREETINGS, OBITUARY READERS! Here’s what the Obitosphere had for us this week: Kenyan Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, bluegrass legend Wilma Lee Cooper, and former Florida Gov. Claude Kirk. Plus, inventors from opposite ends of the utility spectrum -- one who developed the pacemaker and another who invented the Dorito. And a pair of 1960s photographers, a celebrity chef’s childhood mentor, and a spy whose obits read like Le Carre. Let’s turn to the obit pages:
KENYAN NOBELIST: Wangari Maathai was “a Kenyan environmentalist who made it her mission to teach her countrywomen to plant trees and became Africa's first female Nobel Peace Prize winner,” according to the Los Angeles Times’ catch-all lede. The obit labels her “one of Kenya’s most beloved women,” but it’s clear that love didn’t come easy: Campaigning against deforestation in a country with a corrupt government means taking on vested interests. Maathai was beaten, jailed, called a traitor and -- in a detail that the New York Times provides, was divorced by a husband who deemed her too head-strong. “By training rural women to plant trees, she hoped to give them greater control over their lives,” since trees equal firewood, better soil, more food, and less precarious existences for poor rural people, explains the Washington Post, which cites figures from Maathai’s Green Belt movement stating it had planted 40 million trees across Africa. (The New York Times, citing United Nations numbers, places the figure at 30 million.) Unsurprisingly, given her Bono-worthy life’s work, Maathai inspires more Huffington Post celeb-blogger tributes than anyone in Grim Reader’s recent memory.
DORITOS INVENTOR: The death of Arch West, the former Frito-Lay exec who launched Doritos, inspires obit writers to cogitate on the chips’ cultural legacy. “A fingertip-licking snack of choice for legions of couch-lounging football fans, highway-cruising truck drivers and munchie-craving college kids,” says the Washington Post, while the Wall Street Journal archly notes that West’s brainchild was also “the product that introduced Americans to a flavor called Nacho cheese.” Most of the coverage offers the classic Doritos origins story: West was on vacation in San Diego when he visited a restaurant with especially tasty tortilla chips. His corporate bosses were lukewarm on the idea of a competitor for Fritos, but West’s market research won them over. In the most recent one-year period, 924 million bags of the stuff -- which now comes in 33 flavors -- were sold. Fun fact: West’s pal David Pace was having trouble selling jars of his eponymous picante sauce. West suggested he have grocers move them from the ketchup aisle to a perch next to the chips, and the rest is history. The Dallas Morning News says that West’s family was planning “the epitome of a marketing man’s epitaph” by having Doritos sprinkled over his grave.
PACEMAKER INVENTOR: Wilson Greatbatch patented 325 inventions, but the story behind his greatest one -- the implantable pacemaker -- still stands out. He was tinkering with a device to record heart rhythm when he inserted a part of the wrong size. As a result, the device emitted electrical pulses. And, voila: “a device that has preserved millions of lives,” says the New York Times. Greatbatch kept on visiting with students to talk about inventions even after losing much of his eyesight.
FLORIDA REPUBLICAN TRAILBLAZER: The Palm Beach Post labels former Florida Gov. Claude Kirk “colorful” and the Tallahassee Democrat dubs him “flamboyant.” All true! But the man who “during his single, spectacularly colorful term as Florida’s governor from 1967 to 1971, hired a private police force, defied federal court orders and was a herald of a Republican resurgence in the state,” according to the Washington Post, could just as easily have been labeled as someone who played to segregationist emotions and likened himself to a sovereign. All the obits call him a trailblazer of the GOP’s Southern domination -- he once called today’s Dixie right-wingers the “children of my loins,” in typically over-the-top language -- but Grim Reader is always interested in the way the narrative doesn’t quite work: For instance, he was known for having killed a proposed Everglades canal for environmental reasons, and sought new ways to wring tax dollars out of tourists. Criticized for being a huckster, Kirk once replied: “I’m just sellin’ orange juice. Sellin’ orange juice, sellin’ Kirk, sellin’ Florida.”
FIRST LADY OF BLUEGRASS: Grim Reader frequently remarks on how British obits often do much better by obscure American musicians. Case in point: Coverage of Wilma Lee Cooper, the “first lady of blugrass.” Both the Guardian’s piece and the Associated Press’ tell versions of her story, which included being half of a husband-and-wife singing duo, a stint at the Grand Ole Opry, and late-life immortalization at the Smithsonian. But the Guardian’s digresses into such things as the popularity of married duets in the 1930s, the role of sacred music in bluegrass, and the way Cooper created a “spine-tingling new female country sound,” in the words of one writer.
ANOTHER COUNTRY STAR: Also in country music, different obits paint different pictures of singer Johnnie Wright. The New York Times leads with his having been “among the first country musicians to use Latin rhythms.” Those rhythms don’t make the cut at the country-focused CMT News website, which focuses on Appalachian roots and Wright’s marriage to the vastly more famous country musician, Kitty Wells.
HE PLAYED TWITS: Grim Reader doesn’t like to let obits typecast actors who were already typecast in their careers, but he still enjoyed the headline over this Independent piece: “Jonathan Cecil: Actor who specialized in upper-class twits.” The piece goes on to note that he was “made for such parts,” having been born into an aristocratic family.
PHOTOJOURNALIST TURNED HIPPIE: Shel Hershorn “captured iconic images of the civil rights movement and of a fatally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald” as a top photgrapher of the 1960s, says the Associated Press. But then he quit, moved to New Mexico, made furniture, and shunned possessions. His widow tells the Santa Fe New Mexican that JFK’s murder “broke his heart and he just soured on the world... He just wanted to be a hippie.” It’s a poignant image, though it’s complicated a bit by the fact that the obit credits him with capturing famous news events including the shootings at the University of Texas tower -- three years after the assassination.
PHOTOGRAPHER TURNED FARMER: Robert Whitaker “liked to say that there were ‘about 100 key movers and shakers in the 1960s’ and that he had the good fortune to photograph most of them,” declares the Telegraph. The most famous of those movers and shakers: the Beatles, whom he toured with and famously shot holding bloody cuts of meat (people thought the pose was an antiwar message, but it was meant to signify that the band was merely flesh and blood). In 1972, after stints as a war photographer, Whitaker married and became a quiet farmer. But after a 1987 injury made farming difficult, he began cataloguing his Beatles archive.
TAUGHT A CELEBRITY CHEF HIS TRADE: Ines De Costa was “the woman who taught celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse how to cook,” says the Boston Globe. She ran a restaurant near where Lagasse lived as a child; as an adult, he included her recipes in his cookbook and called her a second mother.
IRAQI SCULPTOR: Mohammed Ghani Hikmat “created many of Baghdad’s most famous landmarks,” says the New York Times, which notes that scores of his sculptures inspired by the fables of 1,001 Nights and other tales went up around the Iraqi capital in the 1960s and 1970s. Many were looted after the U.S. invasion; from exile, Hikmat led efforts to recover his country’s looted patrimony. The obit is oddly understated about the fact that Hikmat also helped make the most notable monument to Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, the famous crossed-swords archway.
INJURED BY A YELLOW FLAG: Orlando “Zeus” Brown had a 10-year run in the National Football League, but obits in the Associated Press and the New York Times both give the most real estate to a goofy injury he suffered when he was hit in the eye with a penalty flag; he missed parts of three seasons from the resulting damage, and sued the league for $200 million (he settled for $25 million). Brown was 40, and no cause of death has been given.
COUNTERSPY: The obits for CIA man Brian Kelley read like fiction -- and are almost as complicated. The versions in the Washington Post, Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times have headlines noting that Kelley broke a code Moscow used to communicate with deep-cover agents. But that’s not the half of it: “For two years, in 1999-2000, Kelley was hounded by the FBI in the mistaken belief that he was the ‘mole’ for whom they were searching inside US intelligence,” explains the Telegraph. “Although innocent, the CIA officer was kept away from his desk for nearly two years and confronted with ‘facts’ that might have been borrowed from a spy novel: that he visited strip clubs, was paid in diamonds, took trips to Panama, and had access to pertinent information at certain crucial times.” The real culprit, ultimately exposed after U.S. spooks obtained a tape of his voice from a Kremlin contact, was legendary FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen. Afterward, Kelley went right back to work.
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.
KENYAN NOBELIST: Wangari Maathai was “a Kenyan environmentalist who made it her mission to teach her countrywomen to plant trees and became Africa's first female Nobel Peace Prize winner,” according to the Los Angeles Times’ catch-all lede. The obit labels her “one of Kenya’s most beloved women,” but it’s clear that love didn’t come easy: Campaigning against deforestation in a country with a corrupt government means taking on vested interests. Maathai was beaten, jailed, called a traitor and -- in a detail that the New York Times provides, was divorced by a husband who deemed her too head-strong. “By training rural women to plant trees, she hoped to give them greater control over their lives,” since trees equal firewood, better soil, more food, and less precarious existences for poor rural people, explains the Washington Post, which cites figures from Maathai’s Green Belt movement stating it had planted 40 million trees across Africa. (The New York Times, citing United Nations numbers, places the figure at 30 million.) Unsurprisingly, given her Bono-worthy life’s work, Maathai inspires more Huffington Post celeb-blogger tributes than anyone in Grim Reader’s recent memory.DORITOS INVENTOR: The death of Arch West, the former Frito-Lay exec who launched Doritos, inspires obit writers to cogitate on the chips’ cultural legacy. “A fingertip-licking snack of choice for legions of couch-lounging football fans, highway-cruising truck drivers and munchie-craving college kids,” says the Washington Post, while the Wall Street Journal archly notes that West’s brainchild was also “the product that introduced Americans to a flavor called Nacho cheese.” Most of the coverage offers the classic Doritos origins story: West was on vacation in San Diego when he visited a restaurant with especially tasty tortilla chips. His corporate bosses were lukewarm on the idea of a competitor for Fritos, but West’s market research won them over. In the most recent one-year period, 924 million bags of the stuff -- which now comes in 33 flavors -- were sold. Fun fact: West’s pal David Pace was having trouble selling jars of his eponymous picante sauce. West suggested he have grocers move them from the ketchup aisle to a perch next to the chips, and the rest is history. The Dallas Morning News says that West’s family was planning “the epitome of a marketing man’s epitaph” by having Doritos sprinkled over his grave.
PACEMAKER INVENTOR: Wilson Greatbatch patented 325 inventions, but the story behind his greatest one -- the implantable pacemaker -- still stands out. He was tinkering with a device to record heart rhythm when he inserted a part of the wrong size. As a result, the device emitted electrical pulses. And, voila: “a device that has preserved millions of lives,” says the New York Times. Greatbatch kept on visiting with students to talk about inventions even after losing much of his eyesight.
FLORIDA REPUBLICAN TRAILBLAZER: The Palm Beach Post labels former Florida Gov. Claude Kirk “colorful” and the Tallahassee Democrat dubs him “flamboyant.” All true! But the man who “during his single, spectacularly colorful term as Florida’s governor from 1967 to 1971, hired a private police force, defied federal court orders and was a herald of a Republican resurgence in the state,” according to the Washington Post, could just as easily have been labeled as someone who played to segregationist emotions and likened himself to a sovereign. All the obits call him a trailblazer of the GOP’s Southern domination -- he once called today’s Dixie right-wingers the “children of my loins,” in typically over-the-top language -- but Grim Reader is always interested in the way the narrative doesn’t quite work: For instance, he was known for having killed a proposed Everglades canal for environmental reasons, and sought new ways to wring tax dollars out of tourists. Criticized for being a huckster, Kirk once replied: “I’m just sellin’ orange juice. Sellin’ orange juice, sellin’ Kirk, sellin’ Florida.”
FIRST LADY OF BLUEGRASS: Grim Reader frequently remarks on how British obits often do much better by obscure American musicians. Case in point: Coverage of Wilma Lee Cooper, the “first lady of blugrass.” Both the Guardian’s piece and the Associated Press’ tell versions of her story, which included being half of a husband-and-wife singing duo, a stint at the Grand Ole Opry, and late-life immortalization at the Smithsonian. But the Guardian’s digresses into such things as the popularity of married duets in the 1930s, the role of sacred music in bluegrass, and the way Cooper created a “spine-tingling new female country sound,” in the words of one writer.ANOTHER COUNTRY STAR: Also in country music, different obits paint different pictures of singer Johnnie Wright. The New York Times leads with his having been “among the first country musicians to use Latin rhythms.” Those rhythms don’t make the cut at the country-focused CMT News website, which focuses on Appalachian roots and Wright’s marriage to the vastly more famous country musician, Kitty Wells.
HE PLAYED TWITS: Grim Reader doesn’t like to let obits typecast actors who were already typecast in their careers, but he still enjoyed the headline over this Independent piece: “Jonathan Cecil: Actor who specialized in upper-class twits.” The piece goes on to note that he was “made for such parts,” having been born into an aristocratic family.
PHOTOJOURNALIST TURNED HIPPIE: Shel Hershorn “captured iconic images of the civil rights movement and of a fatally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald” as a top photgrapher of the 1960s, says the Associated Press. But then he quit, moved to New Mexico, made furniture, and shunned possessions. His widow tells the Santa Fe New Mexican that JFK’s murder “broke his heart and he just soured on the world... He just wanted to be a hippie.” It’s a poignant image, though it’s complicated a bit by the fact that the obit credits him with capturing famous news events including the shootings at the University of Texas tower -- three years after the assassination.
PHOTOGRAPHER TURNED FARMER: Robert Whitaker “liked to say that there were ‘about 100 key movers and shakers in the 1960s’ and that he had the good fortune to photograph most of them,” declares the Telegraph. The most famous of those movers and shakers: the Beatles, whom he toured with and famously shot holding bloody cuts of meat (people thought the pose was an antiwar message, but it was meant to signify that the band was merely flesh and blood). In 1972, after stints as a war photographer, Whitaker married and became a quiet farmer. But after a 1987 injury made farming difficult, he began cataloguing his Beatles archive.
TAUGHT A CELEBRITY CHEF HIS TRADE: Ines De Costa was “the woman who taught celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse how to cook,” says the Boston Globe. She ran a restaurant near where Lagasse lived as a child; as an adult, he included her recipes in his cookbook and called her a second mother.
IRAQI SCULPTOR: Mohammed Ghani Hikmat “created many of Baghdad’s most famous landmarks,” says the New York Times, which notes that scores of his sculptures inspired by the fables of 1,001 Nights and other tales went up around the Iraqi capital in the 1960s and 1970s. Many were looted after the U.S. invasion; from exile, Hikmat led efforts to recover his country’s looted patrimony. The obit is oddly understated about the fact that Hikmat also helped make the most notable monument to Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, the famous crossed-swords archway.
INJURED BY A YELLOW FLAG: Orlando “Zeus” Brown had a 10-year run in the National Football League, but obits in the Associated Press and the New York Times both give the most real estate to a goofy injury he suffered when he was hit in the eye with a penalty flag; he missed parts of three seasons from the resulting damage, and sued the league for $200 million (he settled for $25 million). Brown was 40, and no cause of death has been given.COUNTERSPY: The obits for CIA man Brian Kelley read like fiction -- and are almost as complicated. The versions in the Washington Post, Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times have headlines noting that Kelley broke a code Moscow used to communicate with deep-cover agents. But that’s not the half of it: “For two years, in 1999-2000, Kelley was hounded by the FBI in the mistaken belief that he was the ‘mole’ for whom they were searching inside US intelligence,” explains the Telegraph. “Although innocent, the CIA officer was kept away from his desk for nearly two years and confronted with ‘facts’ that might have been borrowed from a spy novel: that he visited strip clubs, was paid in diamonds, took trips to Panama, and had access to pertinent information at certain crucial times.” The real culprit, ultimately exposed after U.S. spooks obtained a tape of his voice from a Kremlin contact, was legendary FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen. Afterward, Kelley went right back to work.
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.
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