Favorite obits of the week (inaugural edition)
Each Friday, all team members will submit their favorite obituaries from the previous week. Be on the lookout for themed posts as time rolls along — i.e., “best-written obits of the week” – but for now, here’s a sampling of eight that runs the gamut from a cosmonaut to a Charles Manson follower (yikes!).
KATE (Susan Atkins, follower of Charles Manson):
Anything about Charles Manson immediately attracts my attention, and this obituary is interests me on that level. As well as being connected with Manson and an event so many people are familiar with, Susan’s life as a woman who spent pretty much all of her adult life in jail is a compelling story.
I like it because I like this quote from the decedent: ”It requires strength of character to act upon one’s ideas; it requires no less strength of character to resist being seduced by them.”
CHRIS (Cy Wainscott, journalist):
Here’s a guy that had some foresight in the journalism industry. Sure, his technological pushes regarded the usage of telephones and (what we would consider) clunker computers in the newsroom — not the integration of the Web, or anything — but his lesson is one that repeats itself. He was an innovator of sorts, quite the apropos reflection of our “innovation project.”
ASHLEY (Maria Gulovich Liu, Allied resistance in WWII):
I particularly enjoyed this LA Times obituary of Maria Gulovich Liu, who became an unlikely member of the underground resistance movement in Slovakia during WWII after allowing a Jewish woman and her child to take refuge in her home. I also was impressed that the LA Times found a black and white picture of Liu taken with American intelligence officers in 1945.
Paul B. Fay Jr., who met John F. Kennedy during WWII military service, became one of the president’s closest friends. This obit is interesting because it describes snippets of Kennedy’s personal life as shared by Fay and others who were members of the president’s inner circle. I’ve always found that just as fascinating as the events that characterized Kennedy’s presidency are the people and moments that defined his private life.
TIFFANY (John Lynch, businessman):
The first paragraph of this obit will grab you, just like Seaboard CEO John Lynch grabbed trout out of English brooks to help feed his family during WWII. Lynch lived the life of a hundred men—he dodged ammunition shells during the overthrow of Argentinean President Juan Peron in 1955, and fought off Colombian guerillas in the 1960s, among other heroic naval missions. A widower and father of six children, Lynch requested that he be returned to the ocean post-mortem—but he will sail the seas in a very different vessel.
At first glance, I felt there was a connection between Safire and I, since we are both journalists. And it’s also interesting to see how the New York Times wrote about its own columnist’s obituary, especially when the paper surely has a lot of first-hand information available. In fact, the obit did tell quite a lot about Safire’s career at the Times. Additionally, I think the story really tells this person’s personality — for example, when it says, “He was a college dropout and proud of it”, or “Mr. Safire called himself a pundit”, or “Mr. Safire called Hillary Clinton a ‘congenital liar’ in print”.
ALINA (Pavel Popovich, cosmonaut):
I think what attracted me to this obituary in the first place was that this astronaut is Russian. I guess I felt a connection because I was born there. I liked this obituary because of all the history of the USSR’s space exploration that is detailed — things that I didn’t necessarily know about the country I was born in. To me, this is what makes obituaries most interesting: the history and other facts that people can learn from other people’s lives.