A New York Times obituary of Seymour Fromer, a collector of one of the largest collections of Judaica in North America, including archives documenting the history of Jews in the American West. Kind of interesting.

IAN (CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS):

My favorite obits this week were of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.  He was terribly influential as a thinker, and leading proponent of structuralism.  Practically every high-quality obituary page ran something on him, and this is just one sample from the Guardian.

KATE (GEORGE NA’OPE):

This is cool article about the history of hula and one of the great hula masters, George Na’Ope.

ASHLEY (QIAN XUESEN):

I enjoyed this Wall Street Journal obituary of Qian Xuesen, a brilliant Chinese man who studied in the United States and became a leading rocket scientist, only to be forced back to China on fears that he was a spy. He went on to a distinguished career in China and received uncommon protection from Mao’s government. A quote by an anaylst, “[Xuesen] was Joe McCarthy’s present to the Chinese,” captures the irony of this interesting story.

MING (QIAN XUESEN):

Mr. Qian is one of the most respectable scientists in China and probably in the world. His contribution to modern China is far beyond words. I was really sad when I heard of his death — so did the whole nation. I found that there are several memorial pages honoring him on social networking sites after his death, on which I read even more stories about him. I read two print obituaries about him on both the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune. I prefer the WSJ one because it gives more detailed information about Mr. Qian’s dramatic life, especially about how he was arrested and expelled from the States by unsubstantiated accusation and his further contribution to Chinese missile programs. It’s a dramatic, ironic and interesting story.

JAKE (LOU FILIPPO):

Lou Filippo was a renowned referee and fighter in the world of boxing who also appeared in five of the Rocky movies. Filippo, who judged 85 world championship fights, presided over the famous ‘Sugar’ Ray Leonard – ‘Marvelous’ Marvin Hagler split decision in 1987.

I enjoyed this very local obituary in the Sacramento Bee about a 59-year-old community activist named Mary Brill. It’s a touching tribute to a woman who suffered multiple scelrosis, a brain tumor and other health ailments, yet remained a powerful and engaged advocate for local issues. It’s also interesting that the Sacramento Bee is not served by Legacy.com, that a fair number of people commented on the obituary, and that Ms. Brill was a single, unmarried woman.

ALINA (INDIRA GHANDI):

This is an old obit from 1984 of Indira Ghandi that was featured on the New York Times website for obits of people who died on this day in history. This obit of the Indian leader is not much like an obit at all. First of all it’s very long and it’s more like a long feature article with a headline and section breaks. I think this is a good example of the kind of reporting that can be done around people who have died, especially prominent ones.

MING (WERNER WOLFGANG HEUBECK):

I feel I’m getting more and more into British obituaries, which are written in a very comic and sarcastic tone. Like this one, a story about a bus manager who fought for Nazi Germany and received a CBE 40 years after from the hands of the Queen. Here’s the words: “‘Her Majesty said that I must have an interesting job,’ he recalled in his gruff Bavarian accent. ‘I told her that sometimes it got too damn interesting.’”

CHRIS (SHILOH PEPIN)

Shiloh Pepin was expected to live for only days, but fought for years until her passing last Friday.  She was born with ‘Mermaid Syndrome’, properly known as Sirenomelia, a condition defined by the fusion of the legs upon birth.  It occurs in only 1 out of  every 100,000 live births, making Shiloh’s story rare — even rarer because of her endurance.  She attracted the attention of a worldwide audience, landing a recent appearance on Oprah.  She was 10 years old.

JAKE (RAY BROWNE):

Ray Browne, a former professor at Bowling Green State University, was a pioneer in the study of popular culture and championed its societal significance. Some people credit him with coining the term ‘popular culture,’ as it is rumored that he started using the phrase in the late 60s.

TIFFANY (MICHAEL MILBRATH)

When the swine flu scare invaded Chicago, one of our journalism professors advised us to jump on this story, because it was going to be a big one. After reading Michael Milbrath’s obituary, I’m glad I didn’t take my professor’s advice.

KATE (Amos Ferguson)

I liked this obituary because Amos Ferguson was so important to Bahamian culture, but someone we, as Americans, probably haven’t heard of.

(MING): The headline caught me in the first place. It seems that all the obituaries I’ve read before were talking about someone who either had achievement in a particular field or had a very interesting. meaningful life. But someone who killed 13 of his neighbors? Never. It’s more like reading a fiction story. When I was reading the details of the story, I could even picture the scene and it really terrified me. I was thinking that the military life this man experienced must have made him very scared, hurt or something. And. very ironically, after this, his life was all about sleeping and watching TV. His entire life literally left nothing but the massacre.

(IAN): I’m a sucker for a serial killer story.  I think it comes from my love of horror movies.  This guy, Howard Unruh, was a real-life monster, and never went to jail.  He lived out his days confined in a hospital for the criminally insane after killing 13 of his neighbors for seemingly no reason at all.

ALINA (MAREK EDELMAN):

Last week I said I really like historical obits. But I think what makes this obituary of Marek Edelman unique, is not that Edelman was a holocaust survivor and not that he had participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and survived. Rather, that instead of immigrating to the United States or the State of Israel, Edelman was one of the few Jews who remained and lived his life in Poland. Despite all the atrocities he endured, Edelman “refused to express open hatred for the Nazis, and for years would not talk about the ghetto uprising.” Besides the particulars of Edelman’s life, the British obit style is very cheeky, for example, “his expertise was in cardiology (uninhibited by his chain-smoking). All this makes the obit a very fascinating read.

ASHLEY (ANNE MANSFIELD SULLIVAN MACY):

I immensely enjoyed this New York Times obituary of Anne Mansfield Sullivan Macy, the aide of Helen Keller who taught her to communicate through touch and allowed her to share her thoughts and feelings with the world. I had no idea that Sullivan herself had later gone blind. It was so moving to learn that Helen Keller was at Sullivan’s bedside throughout her final week of life.

KATE (SHELDON SEGAL):

Sheldon Segal is a feminist you might not know.  He was the scientist who lead the team that created Norplant and later he created Mirena.  Even though Norplant was a failed experiment, Segal did a lot to expand freedom of choice for women and pushed thinking beyond traditional monthly cycles and contraception.

JAKE (CULLENT BRYANT):

Former Los Angeles Rams running back Cullen Bryant played during the team’s super bowl run in 1980 and was physically the NFL’s largest kick returner in his era.

CHRIS (JASPER HOWARD):

Ask any coach, any player, any football personnel — current or former — and they’ll tell you the team is a family.  So needless to say, the death of star University of Connecticut cornerback Jasper Howard was the tragic loss of a brother.  Teammate and punter Desi Cullen said of Howard, an expectant father, “As Jazz looks down on us, I can promise him and his family, that son our daughter will have 105 uncles.”

TIFFANY (IGNACIO PONSETI):

Anyone who dedicates their life to curing a disease deserves a great amount of respect. And anyone who dedicates their life to curing a disease mostly found in young children in the face of adversity deserves sainthood. Dr. Ignacio Ponseti treated and found a non-surgical cure for clubfoot in infants. His developed the treatment in the 1940’s, yet doctors continued to treat clubfoot with invasive surgery. It wasn’t until the early 90’s when parents began trading information on the Web that his method became widespread.

TIFFANY (NAN ROBERTSON):

As an aspiring female journalist, I cannot help but give gratitude to Nan Robertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times who died Tuesday at the age of 83. Nan made it possible for women to be respected and treated equally in the newsroom at a time when they were regarded as second-class citizens. I don’t think there is a woman in the media who doesn’t owe a great deal to Nan Robertson and her legacy.

MING (JULES POWER):

Hey, this guy was a Northwestern alum! The obituary really caught the point of Mr. Power’s life–his achievement in Children’s programming production. The comment from George Woolery’s book tells exactly what Mr. Power helped to introduce: basic science and something more meaningful by producing programs. And I also like the quote from Mr. Power before his first broadcast.

KATE (DICKIE PETERSON):

Dickie Peterson was the lead singer of Blue Cheer, a rock and roll band that paved the way for bands like Black Sabbath.  It’s a band I really like and I think they’re even more important for making music in San Francisco in the late 60s that stood in sharp contrast to bands like the Grateful Dead.

ALINA (RICHARD SONNENFELDT):

As you may have noticed, I really like historical obits. This one is a Daily telegraph obit of Richard Sonnenfeldt, who was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who became the principal interpreter for American prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, helping to interrogate some of the most notorious leaders of the Third Reich. I think these kind of human stories of things that a person achieved under such difficult circumstances are fascinating. There’s so much we can learn from that.

JAKE (AL MARTINO):

Italian singer and actor Al Martino played Johnny Fontaine in The Godfather, a character many suspected to be based off of Frank Sinatra’s mafia connections. It is hard to forget Martino’s entrance in the opening sequence and his pleading with Marlon Brando to persuade a Hollywood director to hire him for a movie role. The Philadephia native also recorded several hit songs during his heyday.

IAN (PETER PINCHERA):

This one isn’t fancy, or well written, or even particluarly enlightening, but my favorite obit of the week is for Peter Pinchera, my high school AP-English teacher.  Back in 1994, he convinced me that Shakespeare was interesting, and the Bronte sisters definitely were not.  As my friend and high school classmate remarked when I mentioned that I saw this obituary, he lived a good long life.

ED: Thumbs up for the shout out to the high school English teacher.  I imagine many Medillians wouldn’t be where they are without such influences.

The first, if you recall, ran the gamut from journalists to a cosmonaut to a follower of Charles Manson.  Think we’re eclectic?  We try again this week.

TIFFANY (Mimi Wedell, actress)

If any of you are ‘Sex and the City’ fans, you will remember when Carrie realizes that the only inheritance that her friend Stanford was going to get from his grandmother was her collection of Chanel suits.

“I love my Stanford. He’s a very sweet boy. But you know, he is a fruit!”

Mimi Weddell, the former model, actress, “hat devotee” and Stanford’s fictional grandmother died on September 24 at the age of 94. From her obit in the New York Times, I can tell she was one fabulous broad.

“She was almost like a performance artist,” her daughter said. “She would walk down the street wearing a pith helmet. It could be embarrassing.”

ASHLEY (Marek Edelman, Polish resistance, WWII)

I chose the Independent’s obituary of Marek Edelman, the last surviving member of the courageous Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, because it includes the striking fact that Edelman later became an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights. This fact was omitted in Edelman’s obituary in the New York Times, and in the Associated Press obituary that ran in the Chicago Triune and other major U.S. newspapers.

KATE (Peg Mullen, activist)

I thought a lot during last fall’s election season about the end of the Vietnam era and Obama ushering in a new kind of collective psyche.  While there are opportunities in that, the potential to forget the effect the violence and the fear had on the country is scary.  Peg Mullen showed a lot of courage and as people of her generation die and we don’t hear the stories from Vietnam as much as we did when I was little, I think it’s really important to listen to her message.

CHRIS (Shelby Singleton, country music mogul)

Yes, I’m from southern Indiana, so it should be natural for me to highlight the passing of a country music man.  But Shelby Singleton was a mogul whose foresight was weighed equally by his historical perspective, the latter of which manifested in his reissuing of much of Sun Records’ seminal 1950s catalog.  His actions, in addition to his eye for talent, helped spur a new generation of music.

JAKE (Alan Bernheim, producer, agent)

Alan Bernheim was a long time Hollywood staple as a producer and literary agent, and is most well-known for his lawsuit against Paramount Pictures, which claimed that he and partner Art Buchwald came up with the idea for “Coming to America,” which later became an Eddie Murphy box office hit in 1988. Buchwald wrote and sold a
treatment to the studio in 1983 about an African prince visiting America to find a wife. Bernheim and Buchwald were each awared $825,000 from the lawsuit, proving that perhaps they were the inspiration for the fictional royal family of Zamunda.

IAN (Meleanie Hain, Baroness of Irony)

I like this one because of the irony in the lede.

“Meleanie Hain, the pistol-carrying Lebanon mom who received national attention for taking a loaded gun to her daughter’s soccer game, was shot to death Wednesday night with her husband in an apparent murder-suicide, police said.”

MING (Irving Penn, photographer)

I like Irving Penn’s obituary for three major reasons. One is Irving’s life itself. As a former photographer for Vogue Magazine, his experience was legendary for contemporaries and much of his work has still been owned by leading art museums, such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two is the lede of the story, which tells Irving’s accomplishments, including his significance in photography, his aesthetic perception and his representative work in just one sentence. The third is the photo with the text. It’s a piece of Irving’s work of Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and literary critic Francline du Plessix Gray, with Alexander and Tatiana Liberman. There’s a great shooting angle and lighting, and the pose and expression make for a fantastic work.

ALINA (Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany)

This obit is from 1992 of Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany in the 1970’s. The Daily Telegraph included it this week in its collection of memorable past obituaries. I like it because it not only recounts the really interesting history of German politics from World War II through reunification, but becasue of the British style of being very frank regarding the person’s shortcomings. For example. the obit recounts all the opposition that Brandt encountered for his socialist policies. Then out of nowhere, the obit goes back in time and identifies him as “the illegitimate son of a sales girl.” This might seem offensive but I think it works because it shows that he started with nothing and really became something.

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.

IAN (Irving Kristol):

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.

JAKE (Paul B. Fay):

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.

MING (William Safire):

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.