Grim Reader, Oct. 23, 2009: Howard Unruh, Elizabeth Clare Prophet and Vic Mizzy
by Michael Schaffer
OCTOBER 23, 2009 TAGS:
For a minute there, Grim Reader was looking forward to a rich collection of obits remembering Kanye West — hip-hop star, George Bush antagonist, and, according to none other than the current president of the United States, “jackass.” Reports of West’s death were everywhere: “RIP Kanye West” was the top trending topic on Twitter; “Kanye West Dead” was the top search trend on Google. But before the Obitosphere could begin drafting West’s life story, reports of the rapper’s death in a California car crash were revealed as a hoax — one that was possibly larding searchers’ computers with malware.
So far as GR can tell, no actual obituary writers were caught by the phony story. Still, its lightning fast spread around the world does offer a glimpse of the future in a world where mainstream news organizations — the folks who employ most obit writers — are cratering. Not so long ago, those writers, who are trained to do things like call police stations to check on reports of “a bizarre car crash in Los Angeles involving two luxury cars,” actually broke news of deaths. Now they’re preceded by blog posts, tweets, and the jungle drums of social-networking, and can focus on longer, more elegant write-ups of lost lives.
In this case, though, the non-professional online media seems to have corrected the story before it even popped up in what GR’s young child will probably not call the mainstream media. The source? The Twitter feed of West’s model girlfriend. “This RIPKanyeWest topic is not funny and its NOT TRUE!,” she tweeted. Think of it as the social media era’s version of Mark Twain’s famous “Reports of my death” quote. It doesn’t seem quite as poetic, somehow.
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In actual death news, there’s a lot of attention to the passing of Howard Unruh, the “Walk of Death” killer of Camden, N.J. Unruh killed 13 people in a 1949 rampage that was the first of America’s famous mass murders. In the New York Times, Richard Goldstein does a particularly thorough job recounting how Unruh ate breakfast at the apartment he shared with his mother, donned a nice suit, and ambled through town killing a meticulously planned list of neighbors, plus anyone in his way. Unruh, who told a reporter he’d have killed 1,000 if he’d had the ammunition, spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Camden’s hometown Courier-Post, meanwhile, catches up with relatives of some of the victims. “I'm glad,” one of them declares.
All the outlets use the Unruh story as a chance to meditate about a sort of calamity that has become all too common. A Philadelphia Inquirer editorial, meanwhile, also waxes elegiac about the once-vibrant manufacturing town across the river that is now New Jersey’s poorest city. “One crime does not define a city, but Camden has struggled mightily since Unruh's infamous act,” the paper writes, stretching a bit much for GR’s taste: San Diego and Denver both hosted spree killings, and neither turned into an economic basket case. Staking out safer territory, other outlets speculate about why a seemingly normal guy would suddenly break. Both the New York Times and the Associated Press note that Unruh was unhappy about being called gay — with only the AP suggesting that he actually was. The Inquirer’s main Unruh piece leaves out the entire issue.
Also in news from Bizarro America, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press both cover the death of cult leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Not that anyone uses that term: Prophet was a “former leader” of a “religious sect,” declares the Times’s headline, sitting above a story that gingerly notes how Prophet’s Church Universal and Triumphant “gained notoriety in the late 1980s for its followers’ elaborate preparations for nuclear Armageddon.” No kidding: Known as “Guru Ma” and claiming to take dictation from Jesus, the Buddha, and other religious celebs, Prophet led her followers from Los Angeles to an isolated Montana spread where they amassed weapons and armored vehicles. When doomsday never came, notes the AP, her “charismatic presence faded.” Oddly, none of the accounts notes that Prophet’s own daughter wrote a memoir of growing up in the cult.
Journalists always get good play in the Obitosphere, and this week was no exception. The American media all fete Jack Nelson, who cut his teeth covering the civil rights movement before becoming the Washington Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times. The major papers all offer a successful correspondent’s CV: a Pulitzer Prize in Georgia, vivid dispatches from there, the enmity of J. Edgar Hoover, a slew of books and a major chunk of the Watergate story, too. But the more interesting piece is in the insider-y Politico, where Jonathan Martin notes that Nelson “outlived the position that made him so influential.” Explaining that capital bureau chiefs were once important people because they commanded large staffs able to turn on a story, Martin notes that the ones “who still exist are often forlorn figures — little known beyond their own publications, busy trying (usually unsucessfuly) to hold the home office at bay from further budget cuts.”
Across the Atlantic, the British press remembers Sir Ludovic Kennedy, who campaigned against historic miscarriages of justice and in favor of voluntary euthanasia, among other things. Kennedy eventually became one of Britain’s best-known TV commentators, inspiring mockery on Monty Python. But the Economist, which dedicates its sole weekly obit to Kennedy, is sweet about the establishmentarian who embraced unpopular causes: “Small-minded Edinburgh lawyers who disapproved of his campaigns might blackball him from their golf club, and did, but their slightly more sophisticated counterparts in London could hardly dismiss him as a wild leftie: they had known him in the Bullingdon Club and shared his views on hunting.”
But the week’s most influential journalistic death may be that of Frank Batten, a Virginia newspaper magnate who in 1982 launched The Weather Channel. Batten’s idea for 24 hours of weather was mocked by skeptics, according to a lengthy and hagiographic obit in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, one of the papers Batten had owned. Today, it reaches 96 million households and was the jewel of a multibillion-dollar sale of Batten’s old empire to NBC Universal. Though that hasn’t been enough, of course, to stop all the mockery. The obits also take a look at Batten’s role in editorializing in favor of integration, with the Virginian-Pilot saying “he helped lead the fight” to desegregate schools, while a more restrained Washington Post obit quotes a historian who notes that Batten had not been an “ardent integrationist” but believed the nasty late-stage fight against desegregation was destroying the state.
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A guy spends his whole career writing music and he’s remembered for two snaps of his fingers. Vic Mizzy wrote songs for Esther Williams and scores of TV shows. But he’s best remembered for his unforgettable — and Grim Reader doesn’t use that in a good way — theme song from "The Addams Family." In the Washington Post, a film historian chalks up the song, with its signature double finger snaps and its “ba-da-da-dum,” to Mizzy’s Tin Pan Alley heritage. “He only had 60 seconds to make a musical point that was memorable so that you’d go, ‘Oh, that show is on, let’s go watch.’” Mizzy also wrote the "Green Acres" theme, lyrics of which make it into the New York Times’s obit. Mizzy owned the rights to the Addams Family song, ensuring his prosperity. “Two finger snaps and you live in Bel Air,” he said in an old interview that’s quoted in nearly every obit.
Also this week, there are obits for Ignacio Ponsetti, an Iowa doctor who developed a nonsurgical cure for clubfoot in infants. Ponseti had been practicing the treatment for 50 years, largely ignored by the national medical community. But in the 1990s, as parents of victims began finding one another online, word spread about the simple, ligament-stretching method. “He’s Mother Teresa and Einstein mixed together,” a colleague told the Iowa City Press-Citizen, in just a wee bit of overstatement.
The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Miller has a nice piece on Sheldon Segal, best known for developing the implantable contraceptive Norplant. Segal lobbied religious leaders and cheer-led in public on behalf of contraception, but, Miller notes, “couldn’t always foresee [the] social consequences. Norplant was eventually taken off the market in the U.S. in 2002 by its manufacturer after medical complaints but also after a loud debate over whether it had been aimed at forcing poor minority women to curtail childbearing.” Segal denounced the idea, and other implantable devices have survived, but the ruckus made him doubtful as to whether any new contraceptive could make it to market in the United States. In 1999, Segal authored a famous article asking whether menstruation was obsolete. If he’d answered the question, GR suspects his obits would have received even more prominent placement.
And finally, it’s a good week for one of Grim Reader’s pet obit obsessions — the obituary superlative. The Independent runs a late obit on Gosta Werner, a Swedish filmmaker and movie historian best known for a series of short films from the 1940s. Werner continued to make shorts into the 1990s, which leads the paper, in the lead paragraph, to label him “the world’s oldest living film director.” Upon his death in July at age 101, that difficult-to-verify title likely passed to Aldo Buzzi, who in the 1950s collaborated with Fellini before becoming better known to Americans as a writer whose correspondence with artist Saul Steinberg was published as a book and whose essays appeared in the New Yorker. He was 99.
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.
So far as GR can tell, no actual obituary writers were caught by the phony story. Still, its lightning fast spread around the world does offer a glimpse of the future in a world where mainstream news organizations — the folks who employ most obit writers — are cratering. Not so long ago, those writers, who are trained to do things like call police stations to check on reports of “a bizarre car crash in Los Angeles involving two luxury cars,” actually broke news of deaths. Now they’re preceded by blog posts, tweets, and the jungle drums of social-networking, and can focus on longer, more elegant write-ups of lost lives.In this case, though, the non-professional online media seems to have corrected the story before it even popped up in what GR’s young child will probably not call the mainstream media. The source? The Twitter feed of West’s model girlfriend. “This RIPKanyeWest topic is not funny and its NOT TRUE!,” she tweeted. Think of it as the social media era’s version of Mark Twain’s famous “Reports of my death” quote. It doesn’t seem quite as poetic, somehow.
--
In actual death news, there’s a lot of attention to the passing of Howard Unruh, the “Walk of Death” killer of Camden, N.J. Unruh killed 13 people in a 1949 rampage that was the first of America’s famous mass murders. In the New York Times, Richard Goldstein does a particularly thorough job recounting how Unruh ate breakfast at the apartment he shared with his mother, donned a nice suit, and ambled through town killing a meticulously planned list of neighbors, plus anyone in his way. Unruh, who told a reporter he’d have killed 1,000 if he’d had the ammunition, spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Camden’s hometown Courier-Post, meanwhile, catches up with relatives of some of the victims. “I'm glad,” one of them declares.
All the outlets use the Unruh story as a chance to meditate about a sort of calamity that has become all too common. A Philadelphia Inquirer editorial, meanwhile, also waxes elegiac about the once-vibrant manufacturing town across the river that is now New Jersey’s poorest city. “One crime does not define a city, but Camden has struggled mightily since Unruh's infamous act,” the paper writes, stretching a bit much for GR’s taste: San Diego and Denver both hosted spree killings, and neither turned into an economic basket case. Staking out safer territory, other outlets speculate about why a seemingly normal guy would suddenly break. Both the New York Times and the Associated Press note that Unruh was unhappy about being called gay — with only the AP suggesting that he actually was. The Inquirer’s main Unruh piece leaves out the entire issue.
Also in news from Bizarro America, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press both cover the death of cult leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Not that anyone uses that term: Prophet was a “former leader” of a “religious sect,” declares the Times’s headline, sitting above a story that gingerly notes how Prophet’s Church Universal and Triumphant “gained notoriety in the late 1980s for its followers’ elaborate preparations for nuclear Armageddon.” No kidding: Known as “Guru Ma” and claiming to take dictation from Jesus, the Buddha, and other religious celebs, Prophet led her followers from Los Angeles to an isolated Montana spread where they amassed weapons and armored vehicles. When doomsday never came, notes the AP, her “charismatic presence faded.” Oddly, none of the accounts notes that Prophet’s own daughter wrote a memoir of growing up in the cult. Journalists always get good play in the Obitosphere, and this week was no exception. The American media all fete Jack Nelson, who cut his teeth covering the civil rights movement before becoming the Washington Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times. The major papers all offer a successful correspondent’s CV: a Pulitzer Prize in Georgia, vivid dispatches from there, the enmity of J. Edgar Hoover, a slew of books and a major chunk of the Watergate story, too. But the more interesting piece is in the insider-y Politico, where Jonathan Martin notes that Nelson “outlived the position that made him so influential.” Explaining that capital bureau chiefs were once important people because they commanded large staffs able to turn on a story, Martin notes that the ones “who still exist are often forlorn figures — little known beyond their own publications, busy trying (usually unsucessfuly) to hold the home office at bay from further budget cuts.”
Across the Atlantic, the British press remembers Sir Ludovic Kennedy, who campaigned against historic miscarriages of justice and in favor of voluntary euthanasia, among other things. Kennedy eventually became one of Britain’s best-known TV commentators, inspiring mockery on Monty Python. But the Economist, which dedicates its sole weekly obit to Kennedy, is sweet about the establishmentarian who embraced unpopular causes: “Small-minded Edinburgh lawyers who disapproved of his campaigns might blackball him from their golf club, and did, but their slightly more sophisticated counterparts in London could hardly dismiss him as a wild leftie: they had known him in the Bullingdon Club and shared his views on hunting.”
But the week’s most influential journalistic death may be that of Frank Batten, a Virginia newspaper magnate who in 1982 launched The Weather Channel. Batten’s idea for 24 hours of weather was mocked by skeptics, according to a lengthy and hagiographic obit in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, one of the papers Batten had owned. Today, it reaches 96 million households and was the jewel of a multibillion-dollar sale of Batten’s old empire to NBC Universal. Though that hasn’t been enough, of course, to stop all the mockery. The obits also take a look at Batten’s role in editorializing in favor of integration, with the Virginian-Pilot saying “he helped lead the fight” to desegregate schools, while a more restrained Washington Post obit quotes a historian who notes that Batten had not been an “ardent integrationist” but believed the nasty late-stage fight against desegregation was destroying the state.
A guy spends his whole career writing music and he’s remembered for two snaps of his fingers. Vic Mizzy wrote songs for Esther Williams and scores of TV shows. But he’s best remembered for his unforgettable — and Grim Reader doesn’t use that in a good way — theme song from "The Addams Family." In the Washington Post, a film historian chalks up the song, with its signature double finger snaps and its “ba-da-da-dum,” to Mizzy’s Tin Pan Alley heritage. “He only had 60 seconds to make a musical point that was memorable so that you’d go, ‘Oh, that show is on, let’s go watch.’” Mizzy also wrote the "Green Acres" theme, lyrics of which make it into the New York Times’s obit. Mizzy owned the rights to the Addams Family song, ensuring his prosperity. “Two finger snaps and you live in Bel Air,” he said in an old interview that’s quoted in nearly every obit.Also this week, there are obits for Ignacio Ponsetti, an Iowa doctor who developed a nonsurgical cure for clubfoot in infants. Ponseti had been practicing the treatment for 50 years, largely ignored by the national medical community. But in the 1990s, as parents of victims began finding one another online, word spread about the simple, ligament-stretching method. “He’s Mother Teresa and Einstein mixed together,” a colleague told the Iowa City Press-Citizen, in just a wee bit of overstatement.
The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Miller has a nice piece on Sheldon Segal, best known for developing the implantable contraceptive Norplant. Segal lobbied religious leaders and cheer-led in public on behalf of contraception, but, Miller notes, “couldn’t always foresee [the] social consequences. Norplant was eventually taken off the market in the U.S. in 2002 by its manufacturer after medical complaints but also after a loud debate over whether it had been aimed at forcing poor minority women to curtail childbearing.” Segal denounced the idea, and other implantable devices have survived, but the ruckus made him doubtful as to whether any new contraceptive could make it to market in the United States. In 1999, Segal authored a famous article asking whether menstruation was obsolete. If he’d answered the question, GR suspects his obits would have received even more prominent placement.
And finally, it’s a good week for one of Grim Reader’s pet obit obsessions — the obituary superlative. The Independent runs a late obit on Gosta Werner, a Swedish filmmaker and movie historian best known for a series of short films from the 1940s. Werner continued to make shorts into the 1990s, which leads the paper, in the lead paragraph, to label him “the world’s oldest living film director.” Upon his death in July at age 101, that difficult-to-verify title likely passed to Aldo Buzzi, who in the 1950s collaborated with Fellini before becoming better known to Americans as a writer whose correspondence with artist Saul Steinberg was published as a book and whose essays appeared in the New Yorker. He was 99.
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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