Executive Times
		2006 Book Reviews
		The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson
Rating:			**
		(Mildly Recommended)
		Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
	Keen If you’re not an avid reader of obituary columns now, you will be after reading Marilyn Johnson’s new book, The Dead Beat. Johnson proves that obituary writing is the most creative outlet in journalism today, and she explores the work of the finest American and British obituary writers. These experts find just the right words and phrases to capture the life of their subjects. Thanks to their keen insights into personalities, readers can enjoy the revelation of humanity in the obituary columns of both major and minor publications. I never would have guessed that there’s an annual Obituary Writers International Conference, but thanks to Johnson, readers can meet the people who attend and what they do when they’re together. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 6, “Ordinary Joe,” pp. 89-95: I was sitting in my comfortable bed outside New York City, reading a story cobbled together by three staff writers about a beheaded screenwriter in the Los Angeles Times. The ninety-one-year-old victim had written Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, then had been blacklisted. He moved to Tucson and became a maître d’, then returned to L.A. to write TV shows pseudonymously, leading an active life until, obviously, the beheading. The killer had climbed a fence with the head under his arm and then broken into a neighboring house, and stabbed a doctor who was on the phone making reservations for a trip to San Jose. I rarely read news stories to the end, but because of its mix of incredible and prosaic details, I couldn’t put this particular one down, and I couldn’t resist sharing it. Listen, I told my husband: “[The perpetrator] was apprehended as he sat on a wall under a row of ficus trees near Melrose Avenue. He had a Bible and a small can of Mace. . . . ‘He seemed like a perfectly normal guy,’ his landlord said, ‘but he was always in a rush.” And there were more details. The screenwriter’s body had been found under blankets in his bedroom by his eighty-six-year-old girlfriend. “I was befuddled for a minute,” she said. “It was like a movie, not real life.” I wouldn’t have been surprised if hundreds of people were discussing that story just like us, horrified, but in a pleasurable way, savoring every one of the details. They make the story— the quotes that slant sideways, the homey, almost funny specifics, the deadpan delivery, the ficus trees shading the be-header as the police made their capture. They have a kind of Elmore Leonard glint to them. They’re particularly L.A., and they resonate in that authentic way that most newspapers seem to capture more by accident than design. It’s almost impossible to teach that sort of writing except by pointing students to a stack of clips and telling them, “Inhale these.” I think they come from the obituaries. I think they come, specifically, from the obituaries that started appearing in the Philadelphia Daily News in October 1982, when these bright shards of detail and glimmering quotes began to appear, attached naturally and unapologetically to the obits of regular people. People whose lives had been considered dull as linoleum to the general public were offered up as heroes of their neighborhood and characters of consequence. Even more important, every particular of their quirks and foibles— the brand name of their cigarettes, their taste in horror movies—was presented as a clue to the mystery of their existence in the fascinating story of their lives. There was this guy in Philadelphia, people kept telling me. You’ve got to find him. Is he still alive? His name was Jim Nicholson. It’s hard to imagine Portraits of Grief, the common-man obits, and the columns remembering local lives that appear across North America now without him. Nicholson plucked people out of the sea of agate type and wrote full-blown feature-style obituaries about them: a janitor, a grandma known for her love of poker, “a world-class scammer.” There are lots of little newspapers in the United States where ordinary citizens are written up when they die, for readers who knew them. Nicholson and the Daily News gave them a big shot’s space in a big city paper, without dressing them up to do it. The subjects were characters from the urban landscape, with nods to Damon Runyon and the hardboiled city columnists, but they were also just regular folks, being written about in a natural way. “What I try to do—” Nicholson said in an early interview. “If two guys meet at Broad and Snyder and one guy says, ‘Did you hear that Joe died?’ And for the next two minutes, they’ll talk about Joe and write his obit—he was a good pooi player, had an eye for women, never broke his word. . .“ He figured out a way to make the obit porous and let some of the real world leach into the strict borders of the form. He was willing to explain in the course of announcing the death of an old neighborhood woman that “jitterbugs,” or “bugs,” were what people called the drug users who hung out on the corner. If it were a plumber’s obit, he’d try to work in a practical tip, like the way to clear a clogged toilet is with hot water and Tide. He had the ability to both inhabit the world he was writing about and give it perspective. They were married three months later and not because they had to. It was one hot day when she watched her oldest son Thad plowing that she decided her children wouldn’t spend their lives following a mule through the South Carolina dirt. In a lot of scenes in past years, she was the woman holding up the scenery. Society today does not assign extraordinary attributes to a 35-year-old heavy-equipment mechanic who is living with his parents and whose possessions do not appear to much exceed a Miller Light and a pack of Marlboros on the bar before him, a union card in his pocket and a friend on either side. Between news of the death and the list of survivors, Nicholson would slip in sly comments like, “He had the digestive juices of a shark,” or “Charlie did it all with one eye.” And he elicited the most incredible quotes. “I had unfortunately burned up my cat Smokey in the dryer,” one story began. “Lou gave me a book, 1001 Uses for a Dead Cat. You loved him and at the same time you wanted to strangle him.” Or, in the obit of a theatrical producer, who had given his friend opening-night tickets: “It was the worst show I’ve ever seen in my life. Country music and ugly women. I didn’t leave because Stan would have been upset. That’s my greatest tribute to him. .. . Stan would understand.” One of his most quoted obituaries is of an unemployed drifter named Thomas “Moose Neck” Robinson whose body lay unclaimed for several days but who, it turned out, had numerous friends and family who had loved him on his own terms. His niece remembered his “good heart. A lot of people just couldn’t understand him, what was wrong. But he heard and saw things we don’t know.” Moose’s brother said, “He was interested in going around asking people, ‘Have you got a dollar?’ I’m not going to tell you a lie. Moose was a drinker. He’d go around and ask people for money, and they’d give him anything he wanted. Everybody fell in love with him.” When it came to sending off the practitioners of the tougher professions, Nicholson preferred the direct quote. The son of a veteran cop recalled, “It would take him two minutes to tell if a guy was dirty or not.” He quoted one city editor about another: “Will could be real gruff at times. . . .You’d ask him a question and he’d either yell at you or mumble, ‘I don’t f—ing know.” Other reporters recorded lines like that, but they didn’t usually use them, and certainly not in the obituaries, a place reserved for the beloved and the devoted. Nicholson used them to advantage, to get past the polite veneer that usually glosses tributes to the dead, and to say things he couldn’t say. His obituary of a handsome mail carrier evoked a ladies’ man with quotes from the man’s daughter—”My dad grieved hard when women would die and people wondered why”—and his first wife—”There were no flies on him, no place.” The best quotes were so much more than pithy lines; they were windows into a culture. From the brother of RICHARD “BOSS HOG” HODGES, SCHOOL CUSTODIAN, BON VIVANT: “Cook?’ said an incredulous William Hodges. ‘His roast beef melted in your mouth. And fish and grits. His biscuits and cornbread talked.” In Nicholson’s hands, the dead shimmered with life. You could taste their cornbread. My favorites were obits where Nicholson, obviously a rebel, refused to write the expected. Adolph J. “Ade” Yeske, a man who could have been “a gentleman farmer in Bucks County,” instead answered the Lord’s call to minister to the poor in the Brotherhood Mission in a hard-luck section of Philadelphia—and was broken by the work. “Thirty-three years of serving soup, running the secondhand shop, preaching sermons to a sea of beard stubble, bleary eyes, drawn women and crying children would grind and burn him out physically and mentally.” The silver lining that readers look for in hard-luck lives, and that Nicholson frequently uncovered, was not to be found here. Instead of manufacturing one, the writer became Ade Yeske’s recording angel. “A fundamentalist, he preached right out of the Bible, and his nephew said he ‘was not especially inspiring.” He lost his patience when people he’d help kick the bottle would show up with liquor on their breath, and the ordinarily patient Yeske “could shove that person out the door in frustration.” Yeske, whose vacations consisted of “day trips in an old Ford or Chevy he drove until it fell apart,” eventually lost his health, and had nothing set aside for retirement. A pension was begged and scraped together, and Yeske spent the rest of his life passing out religious tracts at hospitals and nursing homes in Florida. “Curt Yeske said it rankled him that a man like his uncle was allowed to slip away without any real recognition or send-off. But by all accounts, Ade Yeske didn’t mind because he never actually worked for them in the first place.” Nicholson must have tunneled into that sorry, Job-like world and seen what Ade saw, that being used up in the service of his mission was his mission. He wrote this one without sentiment, and then published the obituary three days before Christmas. Yeske’s story is all the more heartbreaking because the writer threw away his violin. Imagine this obit in the hands of a local newscaster, or one of the sappier chroniclers of ordinary people during Christmas week. It would have been milked for every oily tear. Instead, it reads like a piece of Steinbeck’s bleak America, like Truman Capote or Joan Didion or any of the dozens of great New Journalists who had been bringing the texture of fiction, its telling details and vivid characters, to nonfiction since the mid-1960s. This guy understood the people he was writing about from the inside out and, somehow, made it clear that he was writing about people just like him. In nineteen years he found something extraordinary to say about more than twenty thousand ordinary Philadelphians. And if all that didn’t make him a legend, it seemed Nicholson had juggled his obit writing with a career in counterintelligence. “His spy stuff” one of his coworkers called it. First a captain, then a lieutenant colonel in the army reserve, he’d take a few months’ sabbatical every year to go away on clandestine assignments in Panama or Tajikistan or on the Mexican border. He’d sit at his desk, interviewing grieving people and writing up obituaries; then he’d jet away and run cloak-and-dagger operations in the hot spots of the world. Wasn’t that Superman’s formula? While Johnson does include many illustrative excerpts from obituaries by a wide variety of writers, reading a small part of an obituary is not the same as reading the whole thing. The Dead Beat would have been a better book had Johnson included the complete text of at least a handful of obituaries. Steve Hopkins, June 26, 2006
Buy The Dead Beat @ amazon.com				Go To Hopkins & Company Homepage
Go to 2006 Book Shelf				Go to Executive Times Archives
Go to The Big Book Shelf: All Reviews
	2006 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2006 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Dead Beat.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com