Archive: April 2009
It's Better to be Lucky...
That old saying, "It's better to be lucky than to be good," certainly applied in the case of Jack "Lucky" Lohrke, who died Wednesday in San Jose, Calif. A major league infielder in the 1940s and 1950s, Lohrke batted .242 with 22 home runs and 96 RBIs in 354 games...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 30, 2009; 11:44 AM ET | Comments (0)
Funeral Malpractice
Our colleague Josh White has been running a series of stories about nefarious practices of Service Corporation International, a Houston-based funeral services conglomerate that is facing allegations of mishandling as many as 200 bodies over the past year at a central preparation facility in Falls Church. SCI owns more than...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 29, 2009; 4:22 PM ET | Comments (0)
Barbara Ringer's Untold Story
Last Sunday, I had a Local Life feature about Barbara Ringer, a Library of Congress lawyer who was the first woman to hold the position of register of copyrights, a position that dates back to the 19th century. She was a remarkable woman who was a quintessentially Washingtonian kind of...
By Matt Schudel | April 29, 2009; 11:28 AM ET | Comments (0)
Frankie "Musclehead" Manning Dies
As I noted yesterday in a brief blog item, Lindy Hop dance pioneer Frankie "Musclehead" Manning died. The full story is here. But there's only so much one can say about him with words. It's far better to experience him onscreen. Here he is, in overalls, from the exciting jitterbug...
By Adam Bernstein | April 28, 2009; 12:36 PM ET | Comments (2)
Lindy Hop Pioneer Dies
Frankie "Musclehead" Manning, 94, a Harlem dancer and Tony Award-winning choreographer who became widely celebrated as one of the pioneers of the "Lindy Hop," a breathlessly acrobatic swing dance style of the 1930s and 1940s, died April 27 at New York's Lenox Hill Hospital of pneumonia. Mr. Manning became a...
By Adam Bernstein | April 27, 2009; 3:33 PM ET | Comments (5)
Death and A Spreadsheet
One of the things people seem to find fascinating about obituaries is how there are seasons to the obit year -- more people tend to die over the winter holidays and at the end of winter, we've noticed. When we get a bad weather month, the number of requests for...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 24, 2009; 6:00 AM ET | Comments (2)
Stress and Suicide
One of the saddest stories in today's Washington Post outlines the suicide of David B. Kellermann, the Freddie Mac executive who was found dead yesterday. Overstressed, under the pressure of turning the housing giant around, and a long-time employee committed to the agency's success, Mr. Kellerman lost money and privacy....
By Patricia Sullivan | April 23, 2009; 2:19 PM ET | Comments (1)
Fruitless
Here's a disconcerting bit of information from New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristoff -- disconcerting, that is, if you're a Muslim fundamentalist suicide bomber. Kristoff reports today that a scholar at a recent international conference on the Koran at the University of Notre Dame suggested that the "houri" promised...
By Joe Holley | April 23, 2009; 1:17 PM ET | Comments (0)
Acclaimed Filmaker Jack Cardiff Dies
Jack Cardiff, the British-born Academy-Award winning cinematographer who became one of the most accomplished cinematographers of his generation, died at 94. He worked with directors including Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston and actors such as Marilyn Monroe, who called him "the best in the world." Famed Hollywood director, Martin...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 22, 2009; 1:41 PM ET | Comments (0)
Tilahun Gessesse, Leading Ethiopian Singer, Dies
Tilahun Gessesse, a dominant musical voice in his native Ethiopia, died April 19 in Addis Ababa. He was 68. One news story called him the ''Ethiopian Pavarotti," which is a bit of a stretch culturally even in the world of puffery agents. It also could be seen as an offense...
By Adam Bernstein | April 21, 2009; 5:21 PM ET | Comments (12)
The High Cost of Death
Big spender or thrifty consumer? That question is confronting all of us in these times of economic strife, even when we are faced with some of the last expenses for a loved one. The average funeral in the United States costs $7,323, according to a Washington Post story on the...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 20, 2009; 2:03 PM ET | Comments (1)
Stephen Hawking Ill
Stephen W. Hawking, the British theoretical astrophysicist whom many considered the greatest scientific mind since Einstein, has been rushed to the hospital and is reportedly very ill. Two weeks ago, he canceled his appearance as the headliner at Arizona State University's Origins Symposium, reportedly recovering from a chest infection. The...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 20, 2009; 11:48 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
I thought I'd post a few links to interesting obituaries around the world. Here's an obit from the Toronto Star about a woman who, with her husband, was one of the foremost scholars of the monarch butterfly. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports on the death of a former owner of...
By Matt Schudel | April 19, 2009; 12:54 PM ET | Comments (0)
Death Stars?
Are the four smiling faces at the top of this page "Murderers' Row" or, as an article just out in Editor & Publisher calls us, "Death Stars"? Joe Strupp, E&P's media reporter, interviewed several of us about the blog you're reading and asked the question that everyone asks at first:...
By Matt Schudel | April 18, 2009; 11:25 AM ET | Comments (0)
Obit Writer RIP
It's not a criticism to say Gayle Ronan Sims, who died last night at age 61, would take four hours to do what most of us could in 10 minutes. She was extremely sympathetic, with a soft and soothing voice that made probing questions seem as gentle as an invitation...
By Adam Bernstein | April 17, 2009; 2:02 PM ET | Comments (2)
How Much Can You Say About Marilyn Chambers?
I had the opportunity this week to write the Post's obituary of Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Snow girl who became a star of hard-core pornography in the anything-goes days of the 1970s. At the age of 19, when her face was appearing on boxes of Ivory Snow detergent -- advertised...
By Matt Schudel | April 16, 2009; 1:49 PM ET | Comments (5)
Blogging on Obits
These are tough times for traditional journalism even as the digital horizons for a new kind of journalism expand. As writers, we always want our work to be read, whether in print, online, via mobile applications, no matter if people find us by links or searches or Technorati Profile. We've...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 15, 2009; 11:50 AM ET | Comments (5)
Phillies Announcer Harry Kalas
Harry Kalas, the longtime voice of the Philadelphia Phillies on TV and radio stations in Philadelphia, collapsed today at Nationals Park in Washington and died at George Washington University Hospital. He was 73. Kalas was known for his clipped, laconic style, in which each word seemed to be turned over...
By Matt Schudel | April 13, 2009; 2:23 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Mayor Abstains
Honoring the dead takes many forms in many different cultures, although I'm not sure I've ever heard of a community honoring a dear, departed friend by electing him to public office. That's what the good people of Winfield, Mo., did April 7 when they re-elected Mayor Harry Stonebreaker to a...
By Joe Holley | April 11, 2009; 11:26 AM ET | Comments (0)
Washington Post Obituaries
It's come to our attention that some of our valued readers don't see the actual stories we write everyday, perhaps because they only follow this blog. Just so you know, you can bookmark the Washington Post obituaries web page to see these daily. So this one's for you: Headlines and...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 10, 2009; 12:15 PM ET | Comments (0)
Practitioner of a Lost Art
Here's why we love reading out-of-town obits: How else would we know about the death of Alouette LeBlanc, America's Greatest Tassel Dancer? The story provides a bit of social history, too: Long before stripper poles cropped up on every corner, Bourbon Street in the 1940s and '50s was a swanky...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 10, 2009; 11:05 AM ET | Comments (0)
"Mr. Sandman," "Lollipop" Singer Dies
The Newark Star-Ledger reports the death of Nancy Overton, who as one of the singing Chordettes in the 1950s helped popularize songs including "Mr. Sandman" and "Lollipop."...
By Adam Bernstein | April 8, 2009; 6:31 PM ET | Comments (6)
Shroud-eating Vampires!
So here's a death-related story you don't read every day, courtesy of the Associated Press. (Caution: Don't read this while you're having a meal.) A well-preserved skeleton of a woman found during an archaeological dig near Venice had a brick stuck between her jaws -- evidence, according to the experts,...
By Joe Holley | April 8, 2009; 2:49 PM ET | Comments (0)
Social Media for the Fictional Dead
Since we deal with real people here, it's kind of bizarre to see that Fox television network (the entertainment division) has created an online memorial site and a Facebook memorial for a *character* who died on the series "House." (Thanks to Baltimore Sun critic David Zurawick, on whose blog I...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 7, 2009; 5:26 PM ET | Comments (0)
A Most Dangerous Age
If you're a rock-and-roller, watch out once you hit the age of 27. Thirty-four musicians have left this mortal coil at that age, as Eric Segalstad and Josh Hunter say in their newly published book, "The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll." The 27s include Rolling Stones founder...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 6, 2009; 5:08 PM ET | Comments (3)
No Dignity for the Dead
Here's a story that needs exposure and reaction: National Funeral Home in Falls Church, which acts as a regional clearinghouse that embalms and stores bodies for four other Washington area funeral homes, treated the dead with at best disregard. A witness who worked there said as many as 200 corpses...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 6, 2009; 11:37 AM ET | Comments (1)
California Dreamin'
The great jazz musician Bud Shank has died at the age of 82. He had one of the most unlikely backgrounds for any jazz musician, growing up not in the urban welter of cultural ferment or in the musically rich backwaters of the South -- but on a farm in...
By Matt Schudel | April 5, 2009; 6:41 AM ET | Comments (1)
A Survivor's Tale
Today's Local Life feature is about Flora Singer, a Potomac woman who as a young girl survived the Holocaust with the help of Benedictine nuns, a priest and a Belgian businessman. She was just a teenager when she left Belgium in 1946 and came to America but she was savvy...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 5, 2009; 6:00 AM ET | Comments (1)
'You'll Shoot Your Eye Out, Kid'
After writing yesterday's obit for Fred "Daisy Boy" Gaynor, I've been hearing stories from aging baby-boomers about their first BB gun, almost always a Red Ryder model from Daisy, the company that still makes the iconic "toy." As in "A Christmas Story," radio storyteller Jean Shepherd's now-classic tale of 9-year-old...
By Joe Holley | April 1, 2009; 11:06 AM ET | Comments (3)
