People are Dying to Get There

Reading two or three newspapers a day is one of the great pleasures of my life (don't ask about the others), and on many a day the best part of the paper is the obituaries. I'm talking about what are called the "news obituaries," the article-length tales describing a person's life, as opposed to the short small-print stuff phoned in by the funeral homes. Obviously, you have to have done something noteworthy to earn a news obituary, but the best thing about these pieces is that the people being verbally escorted to the Great Reading Room in the Sky are a delightful mix of the once famous or infamous with the obscure but accomplished. Today's New York Times gives us a good example of what I mean. Here's a link (registration may be required, but go ahead, it's worth it).

Here's the lede of one:

• Candy Barr, an exotic dancer whose hardscrabble life became Texas legend as she befriended Jack Ruby (who killed President John F. Kennedy's assassin), dated a mobster, shot her husband, went to prison for drug possession, and starred - unwillingly, she insisted - in a famous stag film, died on Friday in Victoria, Tex. She was 70.

Now that's a life worth writing about. There is so much in that one sentence -- sex, violence, politics, crime, movies, and the sad state of American education (they have to explain who Jack Ruby is?). Clearly, I need to kick it up a notch if I am going to be NYT obit material.

But wait, there's more:

• Frank Wilkinson, a Los Angeles housing official who lost his job in the Red Scare of the early 1950's and later became one of the last two people jailed for refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether he was a Communist, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 91.

As the obit explains, Mr. Wilkinson perhaps deserves at least a footnote in baseball history. In the early 1950s, when he was director of the Los Angeles Housing Authority, he tried to build large amounts of public housing in the Mexican-American area of Chavez Ravine (then "home to 300 families and roamed by goats and other livestock"). He was accused of being a communist, but when placed under oath he refused to testify about his political beliefs. He was fired, the project was scuttled, and instead of housing for hundreds Chavez Ravine became the site of the privately-owned, very lucrative Dodger Stadium. Mr. Wilkinson did not attend the groundbreaking for the stadium project. He was otherwise detained as a guest at the Lewisburg (PA) federal prison, where he was sent after his conviction for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Finally, there is the story of Evelyn Fowler Grubb, 74, who as the wife of an Air Force pilot shot down over North Vietnam in 1966 helped form the National League of POW/MIA Families. Sadly, at the end of the war, Ms. Grubb learned that her husband had died shortly after his capture. While the North Vietnamese claimed he had died from injuries suffered when shot down, Ms. Grubb believed that her husband's death occurred as a result of his being tortured.

Rest in peace, Capt. & Ms. Grubb. I hope Dick Cheney reads the obits, too.