Grim Reader, Dec. 4, 2009: Mike Penner, Tommy Henrich and Maggie Jones
by Michael Schaffer
DECEMBER 4, 2009 TAGS:
What’s in a pronoun? In the case of Mike Penner, plenty. Back in 2007, the veteran Los Angeles Times scribe penned a column revealing that “I am a transsexual sportswriter.” The column announced that Penner would henceforth write under the byline of Christine Daniels. It became one of the paper’s most widely read articles of the year. And then, 18 months later, Penner was back in the sports pages, and Daniels — who’d been blogging in the Times about the transition experience — abruptly vanished from the publication.
Unsurprisingly, the tale of transition was front and center in the obituaries that followed the writer’s apparent suicide at age 52. But what would they call the dearly departed? Most major-media outlets, including Penner’s employer, opted for the masculine pronoun Penner had used for all but those 18 months: “Mike Penner, a longtime Los Angeles Times sportswriter who made headlines in 2007 when he announced that he was transsexual, has died,” the piece began. It went on to quote Penner’s old boss saying that “Mike was a first-rate journalist, a valued member of our staff for 25 years, and we will miss him.”
At least a few others, though, took a more nuanced approach to the language of gender. Here’s Anna Clarke of the feminist-focused Bitch Magazine: “Such sad news today: veteran Los Angeles Times sportswriter Christine Daniels was found dead today in her home. Suicide is the suspected cause. She was 52 years old.” Gawker, meanwhile, uses Penner’s masculine name while employing a feminine pronoun. And the Advocate, the prominent gay magazine, first went with a Christine Daniels obit before apparently swapping it out in favor of a send-off that used masculine pronouns to describe the Penner years and feminine pronouns for the Daniels period.
By all accounts, Penner was a wonderful person. But the journalist’s status as a public symbol meant that every word of those obits would be scoured for political implications — even the two-letter word “he.” Before Grim Reader could even compile his obit-obsessed take, Washington City Paper sex columnist Amanda Hess was on the case with a couple of thoughtful pieces on the semiotics of obituary pronouns. She also interviews Clarke, who explains that she’d never heard confirmation that Daniels had “intended to de-transition.”
Ultimately, the confusion most likely has more to do with copy-editing rules in the major media than with any malice or intent to cover up a fascinating history that, at least briefly, shook up the traditionally testosterone-filled world of sportswriting. Just as papers haven’t figured out a standard for remembering the same-sex partners of obit subjects, there’s no hard-and-fast rule about what gender to assign a pronoun in a story about a transsexual. And if Grim Reader learned anything during his years at a big newspaper, it’s that copy editors love hard-and-fast rules.
*
A couple of names on opposite ends of the finance scene also pop up in the Obitosphere this week. As head of the brokerage firm Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1980s, Fred Joseph helped pioneer the “junk bond,” the high-risk, high-yield instruments that fueled the decade’s rush of corporate takeovers. Though Joseph never went to jail on insider-trading charges as his protégé Michael Milken did, he was slapped for insufficient supervision; the firm ultimately went bankrupt. Given the nation’s supposedly censorious mood towards even the legal kinds of financial gimmickry, Grim Reader was surprised at the broadly respectful tone of the obits. “He just loved doing deals,” a daughter told the Wall Street Journal. How nice for him.
The obits are downright glowing, though, in the case of business reporter Mark Pittman, who is cited as a rare reporter who saw through the shenanigans that preceded last year’s collapse. “He didn’t have an angry, confrontational ‘Speak Truth To Power!’ attitude towards the industry,” blogs U.S. Rep. Brad Miller — whose outraged quotes often upped the vitriol quotient of Pittman’s pieces. “He just saw them as grifters.”
Interestingly, though, the Obitosphere is divided about what Pittman’s great contribution was. His employer, Bloomberg, leads with Pittman’s investigations of the Federal Reserve, which prompted the wire service to sue the Fed and establish what the obit describes as a major precedent for transparency in America’s central bank. But the Washington Post takes the very same Bloomberg piece and edits it so that the lead paragraph instead features Pittman’s 2007 stories predicting last year’s financial collapse.
Perhaps it’s a week when things come in pairs. Two unlikely lifesavers also merit serious obit attention. There’s a nice Los Angeles Times piece on Harry Hurt, the nation’s foremost expert on motorcycle accidents. It’s hard to fathom now, but before Hurt came along, there wasn’t even much of a consensus on the utility of helmets in preventing serious injury. Since you’re wondering, Hurt died of a heart attack, not an accident involving one of the “garage full” of motorbikes he owned.
The Washington Post and the New York Times, meanwhile, report on Lester Shubin, who developed the Kevlar bullet-proof vest — initially, the Times reports, to protect politicians against assassination following the slayings of Kennedy and King. By the 1970s, it was distributed to police officers. The device is credited with saving 3,000 lives, though only the Times notes the source of that assertion: the Kevlar Survivors Club, an outfit that was started by Dupont, the firm that happens to make … Kevlar. Shubin also helped pioneer the use of dogs to sniff out explosives and, combining his two innovations, developed body armor for canines as well.
Superlative alert! Baseball player Tommy Henrich, who died at 96, is remembered this week as the “oldest living Yankee.” The peculiar playing style of “Old Reliable,” with few strikeouts and multiple extra-base hits, prompts what GR hopes will become a staple of baseball-geek obit culture: The New York Daily News offers a list of players in history to have amassed at least 100 runs, 25 homers, and 10 triples while striking out fewer than 50 times. The relatively unknown Henrich, it turns out, is in good company. ... An old-schooler like Henrich probably would not have required the services of psychiatrist Ari Kiev, who the New York Times remembers for his innovative work with athletes and Wall Street traders on “visualization and relaxation techniques” to enable top-flight clutch performances.
In the world of culture this week, a number of obits mark the death of Bess Hawes, a folk singer and daughter of the famous folklorist Alan Lomax. Hawes is best known for the 1949 song “M.T.A.,” written as a campaign jingle for a leftist Boston mayoral candidate. The song disappeared during the McCarthy era, and when the Kingston Trio covered it, the progressive edges had been sanded down. Hawes went on to be a folklorist herself and a teacher. … There are also lots of obits for Del-Fi Records founder Bob Keane, who’s remembered as the man who discovered Ritchie Valens. Less prominently mentioned is that Keane’s previous record label also released a song Grim Reader has always preferred to “La Bamba”: Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.”
American readers probably won’t notice, but GR’s Commonwealth-bred mother-in-law will surely mark, the death of Maggie Jones, star of the British soap opera "Coronation Street." Jones “played the scowling battleaxe Blanche Hunt,” explains the Guardian, which like its U.K. rivals devotes much of the ensuing obit to Hunt’s celebrated put-downs rather than Jones’ personal history. A sample one-liner, from the Telegraph: “Good looks are a curse, Deirdre. You and Kenneth should count yourselves lucky.” Still, the Times of London explains the secret that allowed Jones to play her comic part so compellingly. “She insisted that she did not find Blanche funny and could not play her properly if she did,” the paper says.
Switzerland’s vote this week to ban the construction of minarets has been lambasted as uncharacteristically closed-minded. But it probably wouldn’t have surprised Swiss historian Jean-Francois Bergier, whose October death hit the Obitosphere a day after election day via the Times of London. Bergier became a public figure after investigating his country’s handling of Jewish bank accounts during World War II. He concluded that Swiss authorities were much more closely integrated with Hitler’s Germany than they’d let on, and argued that they could have avoided such a role. “Large numbers of persons whose lives were in danger were turned away — needlessly,” he concluded.
Also in England, the Telegraph has a memorable obit on Geoffrey Moorhouse, a journalist-turned-travel-writer whose famous crossing of the Sahara became the basis for a popular book. Recounting the journey, the paper notes that it was Moorhouse’s fortune not to have been “the subject of an obituary 35 years ago alongside a news story headlined: ‘Intrepid English Journalist Dies in Desert.’”
And while we’re on the subject of clichéd British archetypes, the Independent catches up with the story of Lady Mairi Bury, whose father, Lord Londonderry, spent chunks of the 1930s trying to avert war with Nazi Germany. His lordship is today remembered as a naïve dilettante, but his amateur diplomacy means Bury was one of the last Britons who could describe an interaction with Adolf Hitler. “I thought, what a nondescript person,” she’s quoted as saying. “You would never have picked him out in a crowd. No, I’m afraid no aura of evil, no sense of foreboding, a rather quiet voice. In fact, little stands out other than the memory of his most extraordinary blue eyes.”
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the
American pet industry.
Unsurprisingly, the tale of transition was front and center in the obituaries that followed the writer’s apparent suicide at age 52. But what would they call the dearly departed? Most major-media outlets, including Penner’s employer, opted for the masculine pronoun Penner had used for all but those 18 months: “Mike Penner, a longtime Los Angeles Times sportswriter who made headlines in 2007 when he announced that he was transsexual, has died,” the piece began. It went on to quote Penner’s old boss saying that “Mike was a first-rate journalist, a valued member of our staff for 25 years, and we will miss him.” At least a few others, though, took a more nuanced approach to the language of gender. Here’s Anna Clarke of the feminist-focused Bitch Magazine: “Such sad news today: veteran Los Angeles Times sportswriter Christine Daniels was found dead today in her home. Suicide is the suspected cause. She was 52 years old.” Gawker, meanwhile, uses Penner’s masculine name while employing a feminine pronoun. And the Advocate, the prominent gay magazine, first went with a Christine Daniels obit before apparently swapping it out in favor of a send-off that used masculine pronouns to describe the Penner years and feminine pronouns for the Daniels period.
By all accounts, Penner was a wonderful person. But the journalist’s status as a public symbol meant that every word of those obits would be scoured for political implications — even the two-letter word “he.” Before Grim Reader could even compile his obit-obsessed take, Washington City Paper sex columnist Amanda Hess was on the case with a couple of thoughtful pieces on the semiotics of obituary pronouns. She also interviews Clarke, who explains that she’d never heard confirmation that Daniels had “intended to de-transition.”
Ultimately, the confusion most likely has more to do with copy-editing rules in the major media than with any malice or intent to cover up a fascinating history that, at least briefly, shook up the traditionally testosterone-filled world of sportswriting. Just as papers haven’t figured out a standard for remembering the same-sex partners of obit subjects, there’s no hard-and-fast rule about what gender to assign a pronoun in a story about a transsexual. And if Grim Reader learned anything during his years at a big newspaper, it’s that copy editors love hard-and-fast rules.
*
A couple of names on opposite ends of the finance scene also pop up in the Obitosphere this week. As head of the brokerage firm Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1980s, Fred Joseph helped pioneer the “junk bond,” the high-risk, high-yield instruments that fueled the decade’s rush of corporate takeovers. Though Joseph never went to jail on insider-trading charges as his protégé Michael Milken did, he was slapped for insufficient supervision; the firm ultimately went bankrupt. Given the nation’s supposedly censorious mood towards even the legal kinds of financial gimmickry, Grim Reader was surprised at the broadly respectful tone of the obits. “He just loved doing deals,” a daughter told the Wall Street Journal. How nice for him.
The obits are downright glowing, though, in the case of business reporter Mark Pittman, who is cited as a rare reporter who saw through the shenanigans that preceded last year’s collapse. “He didn’t have an angry, confrontational ‘Speak Truth To Power!’ attitude towards the industry,” blogs U.S. Rep. Brad Miller — whose outraged quotes often upped the vitriol quotient of Pittman’s pieces. “He just saw them as grifters.”
Interestingly, though, the Obitosphere is divided about what Pittman’s great contribution was. His employer, Bloomberg, leads with Pittman’s investigations of the Federal Reserve, which prompted the wire service to sue the Fed and establish what the obit describes as a major precedent for transparency in America’s central bank. But the Washington Post takes the very same Bloomberg piece and edits it so that the lead paragraph instead features Pittman’s 2007 stories predicting last year’s financial collapse.
Perhaps it’s a week when things come in pairs. Two unlikely lifesavers also merit serious obit attention. There’s a nice Los Angeles Times piece on Harry Hurt, the nation’s foremost expert on motorcycle accidents. It’s hard to fathom now, but before Hurt came along, there wasn’t even much of a consensus on the utility of helmets in preventing serious injury. Since you’re wondering, Hurt died of a heart attack, not an accident involving one of the “garage full” of motorbikes he owned.The Washington Post and the New York Times, meanwhile, report on Lester Shubin, who developed the Kevlar bullet-proof vest — initially, the Times reports, to protect politicians against assassination following the slayings of Kennedy and King. By the 1970s, it was distributed to police officers. The device is credited with saving 3,000 lives, though only the Times notes the source of that assertion: the Kevlar Survivors Club, an outfit that was started by Dupont, the firm that happens to make … Kevlar. Shubin also helped pioneer the use of dogs to sniff out explosives and, combining his two innovations, developed body armor for canines as well.
Superlative alert! Baseball player Tommy Henrich, who died at 96, is remembered this week as the “oldest living Yankee.” The peculiar playing style of “Old Reliable,” with few strikeouts and multiple extra-base hits, prompts what GR hopes will become a staple of baseball-geek obit culture: The New York Daily News offers a list of players in history to have amassed at least 100 runs, 25 homers, and 10 triples while striking out fewer than 50 times. The relatively unknown Henrich, it turns out, is in good company. ... An old-schooler like Henrich probably would not have required the services of psychiatrist Ari Kiev, who the New York Times remembers for his innovative work with athletes and Wall Street traders on “visualization and relaxation techniques” to enable top-flight clutch performances.
In the world of culture this week, a number of obits mark the death of Bess Hawes, a folk singer and daughter of the famous folklorist Alan Lomax. Hawes is best known for the 1949 song “M.T.A.,” written as a campaign jingle for a leftist Boston mayoral candidate. The song disappeared during the McCarthy era, and when the Kingston Trio covered it, the progressive edges had been sanded down. Hawes went on to be a folklorist herself and a teacher. … There are also lots of obits for Del-Fi Records founder Bob Keane, who’s remembered as the man who discovered Ritchie Valens. Less prominently mentioned is that Keane’s previous record label also released a song Grim Reader has always preferred to “La Bamba”: Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.”
American readers probably won’t notice, but GR’s Commonwealth-bred mother-in-law will surely mark, the death of Maggie Jones, star of the British soap opera "Coronation Street." Jones “played the scowling battleaxe Blanche Hunt,” explains the Guardian, which like its U.K. rivals devotes much of the ensuing obit to Hunt’s celebrated put-downs rather than Jones’ personal history. A sample one-liner, from the Telegraph: “Good looks are a curse, Deirdre. You and Kenneth should count yourselves lucky.” Still, the Times of London explains the secret that allowed Jones to play her comic part so compellingly. “She insisted that she did not find Blanche funny and could not play her properly if she did,” the paper says.
Switzerland’s vote this week to ban the construction of minarets has been lambasted as uncharacteristically closed-minded. But it probably wouldn’t have surprised Swiss historian Jean-Francois Bergier, whose October death hit the Obitosphere a day after election day via the Times of London. Bergier became a public figure after investigating his country’s handling of Jewish bank accounts during World War II. He concluded that Swiss authorities were much more closely integrated with Hitler’s Germany than they’d let on, and argued that they could have avoided such a role. “Large numbers of persons whose lives were in danger were turned away — needlessly,” he concluded.Also in England, the Telegraph has a memorable obit on Geoffrey Moorhouse, a journalist-turned-travel-writer whose famous crossing of the Sahara became the basis for a popular book. Recounting the journey, the paper notes that it was Moorhouse’s fortune not to have been “the subject of an obituary 35 years ago alongside a news story headlined: ‘Intrepid English Journalist Dies in Desert.’”
And while we’re on the subject of clichéd British archetypes, the Independent catches up with the story of Lady Mairi Bury, whose father, Lord Londonderry, spent chunks of the 1930s trying to avert war with Nazi Germany. His lordship is today remembered as a naïve dilettante, but his amateur diplomacy means Bury was one of the last Britons who could describe an interaction with Adolf Hitler. “I thought, what a nondescript person,” she’s quoted as saying. “You would never have picked him out in a crowd. No, I’m afraid no aura of evil, no sense of foreboding, a rather quiet voice. In fact, little stands out other than the memory of his most extraordinary blue eyes.”
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the
American pet industry.
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