Post Mortem

Paul Bloom, Energy Department Lawyer

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:31:16 -0500

The Department of Energy was created in August 1977 by President Jimmy Carter, and Paul Bloom joined its staff as a special counsel in December of that year. He spent only three years as a lawyer for the department, but he had an outsized influence. Mr. Bloom, who died last month, was given the unenviable job of dragging money out of the country's major oil companies. He had been a natural resources lawyer in New Mexico before coming to Washington, and he wasn't expected to be able to accomplish much against the arrayed legal and financial might of Big Oil. There were all sorts of complicated pricing regulations on the petroleum industry in the 1970s, and Mr. Bloom was charged with finding cases when the companies had overcharged their customers. Against all odds, Mr. Bloom and his staff of 450 lawyers and auditors, launched investigations of the country's 34 largest

John Mashek and the President

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:33:40 -0500

John Mashek, a longtime political journalist, died earlier this week. He covered presidential campaigns and conventions spanning four decades and was a panelist on televised presidential and vice presidential debates. At a presidential debate in 1992, Mr. Mashek was best remembered for asking independent candidate H. Ross Perot about his proposed gasoline price increase, to which the jug-eared candidate responded with self-deprecating wit, "If there's a fairer way, then I'm all ears." It was a big folksy hit with the audience, but audiences are fickle, and when Perot tried to use it again, it flopped. In the 1988 debate Mr. Mashek asked then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had been suffering from heart problems, about the reservations of many in his party about the "qualifications and credentials" of gaffe-prone Sen. Dan Quayle (R-Ind.) as his running mate: "What do you see in him that others do not?" Bush replied, "I

Spotlight: Penny Marshall

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:25:13 -0500

Actress and director Penny Marshall, best known for her role as Laverne DeFazio on the 1970's hit TV show, "Laverne & Shirley," has been diagnosed with a brain tumor, according to the National Enquirer. Ms. Marshall, 66, underwent brain surgery at a New York Hospital on Oct. 30, after falling ill on her way to New York. The Bronx native was planning on being in Manhattan to see her favorite baseball team, the Yankees, in the playoffs. Entertainment Tonight is reporting that Ms. Marshall is "doing fine" after spending a short time in the hospital. After starring on TV, Ms. Marshall went on to become a successful movie producer and director. Some of the films she directed include "Big," (1988), "Awakenings" (1990), and "A League of Their Own" (1992). She directed her daughter, Tracy Reiner, whose father is Ms. Marshall's ex-husband, actor and director Rob Reiner, in "A Leauge of

The Daily Goodbye

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:48:57 -0500

Good morning. Two good obits from my old college town: Jean Marie Fellin had one of the most interesting nursing gigs imaginable -- she worked the racetrack in Milwaukee and for about 10 years worked at the Indianapolis 500. And Myron Gordon, the judge who presided over the case of the Milwaukee 14, a group of protesters against the Vietnam War who broke into the Selective Service office in Milwaukee and destroyed draft records. Port Townsend, Wash. is a thriving, picturesque town on the Olympic peninsula in the far Northwest. It's also a center for the arts, and for that, the Seattle Times says, you can thank Joseph Wheeler. Down the coast in the hilly San Francisco area, Bill Provines spent three years as an engineer on the crookedest railroad in the world. There were 281 curves in the 8 1/4-mile line from Mill Valley to the top of Mount

Francisco Ayala, Critic of Franco, Dies

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:10:24 -0500

T. Rees Shapiro, a contributor the obit desk, just wrote the obituary for Francisco Ayala, one of Spain's most celebrated writers. Mr. Ayala died Nov. 3 at his home in Madrid at 103. Shapiro writes: Francisco Ayala was part of a generation of exiled Spanish writers, including Federico Garcia Lorca, whose works reflected the violence they witnessed during the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Mr. Ayala wrote more than 50 novels, short stories and essays commenting on his life in exile and the suffering in his country under Franco's rule. Mr. Ayala wrote dark tales of misery and oppresion fueled by dictators with unquenchable addictions for power. Critics called his works masterpeices of Hispanic literature, and spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero called him a symbol of the country's "moral reconstruction" during Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy. The secret to Mr. Ayala's enduring success was

The Daily Goodbye

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:15:00 -0500

Good morning. As readers of this blog know, but readers of the print newspaper do not, there were two major obits yesterday: French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and Nien Cheng, who wrote "Life and Death in Shanghai" about her ordeal during the Cultural Revolution in China. All those athletes but hardly a word for the referees until now: Lou Filippo, World Boxing Hall of Famer who kept the matches clean, has died. He had been a boxer himself, with a record of 23-9-3 with 8 knockouts. As a ref, he appeared in the second, third, fourth and fifth installments of the "Rocky" films. It's kind of hard to tell what Bill Hayes did for a living -- oh, here it is, he was an advertising agency owner -- but he appeared to have had quite a life. As this Amarillo, Texas columnist says: It's a good thing he authored a book,

Author Nien Cheng Dies

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:44:20 -0500

The great historian and journalist Stanley Karnow once erroneously reported the death of Nien Cheng and her daughter, based on information from faulty sources in Hong Kong. She wasn't dead; she was in prison, held by Chinese Communists for six and half years. When she was released, she learned from her bankers that her circle of friends had already mourned her loss. She later autographed a book for Karnow with the inscription that essentially said, "Not dead yet." So it was fitting that Mr. Karnow called Tuesday morning to report the death of Nien Cheng. She became internationally famous in 1987 after publication of her book "Life and Death in Shanghai," a harrowing and yet incredibly inspiring tale of how the relatively wealthy widow of a diplomat and oil company executive was targeted, harassed, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually triumphed over the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution in China. It's

Claude Levi-Strauss Dies

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:28:15 -0500

Claude Levi-Strauss, the French social anthropologist who influenced generations of intellectuals with his ideas on culture and said the human species would become extinct, has died. He was 100. For those of you for whom Levi-Strauss means denim, you should know he was one of the preeminent social anthropologists of the 20th century and whose erudite, often mind-bendingly labored studies of indigenous Brazilian tribes led to influential theories examining human behavior and culture Mr. Lévi-Strauss was often paired with writers Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux as the towering French intellectuals of the last century. He said his life's work was "an attempt to show that there are laws of mythical thinking as strict and rigorous as you would find in the natural sciences." He was best-known for popularizing a social science theory known as "structuralism," a philosophical method of approaching anthropology that identified behavioral codes that were crucial to

The Daily Goodbye

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:45:23 -0500

Good morning! Venture capitalists played an outsized role in the Silicon Valley boom a decade ago and they're still out there, funding small businesses and coaxing new entrepreneurs along. Buddy Ruvelson was one of them, and perhaps one of the very first, according to this Minneapolis Star-Tribune story. Stealing Bryan Marquard's lede, which should get you into this obit: Even if Robert H. Rines had never seen what he believed was the hulking hump of a creature break the surface of Scotland's Loch Ness, his life would have captured imaginations and filled a lengthy resume. Patents on his inventions number more than 80, including those for devices that sharpened the resolution of radar and sonar scanning. He founded Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire and helped push patent and intellectual property law into the legal spotlight. He taught at Harvard and MIT and, along with being a lawyer, had

Wal-Mart Sells Caskets Online

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:56:48 -0500

Uber-cost-saving retailer Wal-Mart has started selling caskets on its website. Yes, you read correctly. Caskets and urns to be exact. It's actually not unheard of to sell caskets online. Wholesale retailer Costco also provides a similar service. But is it a little eerie that while shopping for, let's say, diapers, or perhaps, Christmas decorations, you also can order a casket, to be delivered within 48 hours? And you never know, maybe you will qualify for free shipping. According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, funeral homes must accept third party caskets so perhaps Wal-Mart has just made another brilliant business decision. After all, people are usually either buried in some sort of casket or cremated and placed in an urn. And who doesn't love the convenience of shopping online? Right now Wal-Mart offers 14 caskets and more than 20 urns. Caskets range in price from $895 for the "Lady de

All About Obits

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:03:33 -0500

Obit writers do mingle among the living from time to time. Perhaps it was someone's idea of a pre-Halloween joke, but I spoke last week at the private Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., to an audience of faculty members of students about the craft of writing obituaries. With lots of teenagers in attendance -- who probably never read or care much about obits - I tried to make the speech as anecdotal and fun as possible. I spoke about how a lobbyist for despots lobbied me to do his own obit in advance and about the decisions we make in newsgathering in a complicated life. In short, some families still confuse obits for eulogies, and not everyone is happy when we include facts that are less-than-flattering. The speech also gave me a chance to explain a brief history of how obits -- and the reputation of those who write them

The Daily Goodbye

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:08:01 -0500

Good morning November, and all those who pass through it. Norton Buffalo, the harmonica maestro with the Steve Miller Band who appeared on recordings with Bonnie Raitt, Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, and many more, died over the weekend from cancer. Yes, you've heard him: he appeared on more than 180 albums. A couple of Asian obits, both in the LA Times: Lee Hu-rak, former South Korean spy chief who brokered the signing of a historic 1972 peace document with North Korea after a secret trip to Pyongyang; and Qian Xuesen, a former Caltech rocket scientist who helped establish the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then was deported in 1955 on suspicion of being a Communist. He became the father of China's space and missile programs. Blossom where you're planted, an old saying goes, and after his French restaurant failed in working class Baltimore, Peter Michael Yagjian hit on a better idea: baby

Roy DeCarava, photographer in black and white

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:17:30 -0500

Roy DeCarava, one of America's great photographers, has died at the age of 89. He spent much of his life documenting his native Harlem, only he wouldn't have used the term "documenting." He considered himself an artist whose medium happened to be photography and consciously steered away from the journalistic and documentary traditions of photography. He sought to bring a sense of artistic understanding to the lives of his fellow Harlem residents, imbuing them with dignity, pathos and character that reach beyond their social circumstances. DeCarava did freelance work for magazines, but he was never a journalistic photographer in the way that, say, Gordon Parks and W. Eugene Smith were photojournalists. (DeCarava had a long dispute with Parks over whether Life magazine, Parks's employer, discriminated against black photographers.) DeCarava brought a profound sensibility to his work that is distinctive, original and entirely his own. He shot entirely in black and

The Daily Goodbye

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:30:20 -0500

Good morning. John Harris, while in the employ of the National Enquirer, was sent hither and yon, searching for Utopia. Every time he thought he found it, the newspaper owner found a reason to shoot it down. It was the greatest assignment ever given to any reporter in any newspaper, a colleague said, even though after four and a half months, he hadn't written a word. Another wordsmith who skewered his own bureaucracy has died. Leonard Drohan rocketed to the top of the best-seller list in 1957 with "Come with Me to Macedonia" but his other books went unpublished. "His whole life was sort of the struggle between poet and pragmatist,'' said his son. "Having two sons and a family to support, he kept his government job while always wanting to write novels.'' Gustavo de la Vina, the former U.S. Border Patrol chief and its first leader of Mexican American

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Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:30:20 -0500

Maria Shriver on Grief

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:06:10 -0500

Maria Shriver knows about grief, given all the tragedies that have afflicted her extended family over the years. Like most in the large Kennedy family, she's been private about her losses but she made an exception Tuesday when at a conference about women, she talked about dealing with the death of her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, followed just weeks later by her uncle, Edward M. Kennedy. "In the United States, we are grief illiterate," she said. "I go through my days trying to act incredibly normal. ... I go through the motions," she said. "But every minute of every day, I can feel my broken heart." "The real truth is, I'm not fine," she said. "The real truth is, my mother's death has brought me to my knees. I had feared it my entire life. I was terrified that when it actually happened, I wouldn't be able to go on."