Why the L.A. Times is my favorite obit paper
My declaration of this a week or two ago greatly amused friend Dave. Now, as the NYT boasts of the 1,200 obits staffers keep in the can, I must make my point for the LAT. What the LAT seems to care about all the time — and what the NYT seems to only care about sometimes — is the relatable human element. In LAT obituaries, a detail may not be a great achievement or milestone in a person's noteworthy life. A detail may just show how a noteworthy life modestly included a person.
On Rose Friedman, wife/collaborator: "Until Milton Friedman's death in 2006 at 94, the two were rarely apart; they frequently held hands at academic conferences and in airports. She often had a more fiery public presence than the gentle style of her husband. Milton Friedman often said his wife was the only person who won arguments with him."
On Ed Reimers, whose cupped hands stood for Allstate: "After a hurricane, flood or other national disaster, 'he'd fly in, and they'd do their commercials,' [his daughter] said. 'I have pictures of him in a trench coat setting up and interviewing people, with the whole place sort of demolished around him.' "
On Karla Kushkin, children's author and illustrator: "At 4, she dictated her first poem, about a hydrangea bush outside their country house, to her mother. ¶ Her father owned a small advertising agency."
On Riccardo Cassin, the Italian mountaineer: "Cassin left home at age 17 to work the bellows at a blacksmith forge in Lecco, a small Italian valley village nestled near the southeastern neck of Lake Como. His first passion had been boxing, but on the weekends, Cassin accompanied his ragtag group of friends that called themselves the 'Ragni Di Lecco,' or spiders of Lecco, on climbing trips to the smaller local 7,000-foot summits."
On Carlene Hutchins, master violin maker: "She insisted that the secret to their superior sound was not in the wood; not, as some experts speculated, in the bacteria that ate away at the wood, making it more permeable; not in the powdery pumice from Mount Vesuvius that Stradivari may or may not have used to thicken his varnish; and most certainly not in some mystical genius that only he and the other old Cremona masters possessed."
On Eleutherius Winance, an abbey founder: "A few years after arriving in Valyermo, Winance began to cultivate a garden using found or donated plants, including roses, herbs, cactuses, poplars and giant sequoias. He laid out the carpet of grass by hand, beginning with one square of sod from the abbey's pastures."
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:37 PM
i was a reporter trainee at the LA Times in 1989 and was assigned to sit near the obit writers, and it was like telling me to go sit near deities. They are such amazing writers and researchers. I was so thrilled and awed at the same time to be that close to them.
September 4th, 2009 at 8:55 AM
Lede today: "David Avadon, a professional illusionist who wrote a 2007 book on pickpocketing, which was his trademark theatrical act, has died. He was 60…."
August 15th, 2010 at 1:59 PM
[...] master sommelier of the obit, I'm well on the record that the Los Angeles Times writes the country's consistently best obituary [...]