As a cub reporter on my hometown newspaper some decades ago, I was given to write all of the things the senior staff wanted to avoid. One category of such chores was the obituaries.
Usually, the first information about a local death came from the undertaker, who expected a mention in the obituary as compensation. Sometimes, the family called and we had a form to collect the vital statistics. In a small town, where most people knew each other, the tone of the obituary had to be benevolent, If the departed was the town drunk or a deadbeat, it was not mentioned in his obituary. For the mayor or the scion of the town’s founding family, we went into more detail with the same benevolent tone and a few more adjectives. We used photographs when we could get them. The auto mechanic or bricklayer always was pictured stiffly in his Sunday suit and tie.
I tried to make my articles something more than the vital statistics, searching for an interest in growing prize roses, barber shop quartet singing, parachute jumping, or volunteer leadership in the Chamber of Commerce or the Boy Scouts. I soon found this to be dangerous because family members often complained that I selected the wrong details. So I joined the other reporters in dodging the task of obituaries whenever I could.
A few summers later, when I helped a newspaper in a neighboring town with a centennial issue, I wrote a couple of hundred family sketches. The principal difference is that the subjects of the sketches were alive and I interviewed them before composing my essay. But for some years afterward, when the editor of that paper needed an obituary, he could turn to the sketch and write a new lead about the death of the individual, and no one ever noticed that he was plagarizing his own publication.
For the first few years after I got out of college, when I got back to my hometown, I read the news and society pages of the nearby city newspapers to learn about classmates who got good jobs, who got married, or who won prizes and medals.
I got away from writing or even reading obituaries for some years. In the big city, I resumed scanning the obituary pages of the major newspapers. Those deserving obituaries by city standards had done something of significance, good or bad. While the late lamented still was not accused of beating his wife, it was mentioned that he had run his business into bankruptcy, that he was indicted and convicted of embezzlement or bribing a city official or both, or that he had struck and killed a pedestrian one dark night or even that he was known to be a member of a criminal gang. I found that the newspapers assigned a senior reporter to the full-time task of writing obituaries. For most public figures, the paper had a draft obituary lacking only the cause and circumstance of death and the list of survivors.
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