Working the Dead Beat

 

WORKING THE DEAD BEAT

50 LIVES THAT CHANGED CANADA

SANDRA MARTIN

 

Foreword by William Thorsell

Copyright © 2012 Sandra Martin

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Martin, Sandra

Working the deadbeat : 50 lives that changed Canada / Sandra

Martin ; foreword by William Thorsell.

Includes bibliographical references.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-77089-049-7

1. Canada—Biography. I. Title.

FC25.M373 2012 920.071 C2012-902958-0

Jacket design: Brian Morgan

 

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For Hazel and Elle

From a time before you were born

Foreword

S
ANDRA MARTIN OBSERVES
that “context is everything” in writing obituaries, defending the role of the journalist as disinterested observer in parsing a dead person's nature and deeds. In this volume of fifty lives spent and done, Sandra Martin provides context about the obituary form itself, which makes her telling of tales all the more pungent. She demonstrates through these often gripping portraits that rumours of the obituary's death in the digital age have been grossly exaggerated. The gauzy eulogy is ultimately no competition for journalism's obituary, whose purpose is “to bring the subject alive for readers — warts and all.”

“As skinny as a preying mantis, tottering on platform shoes, sucking on a cigarette, her hair a cumulus of auburn curls . . .” — that could only be Jackie Burroughs to anyone who has been around Canadian theatre in the past fifty years. Great obituary writers must be mordant observers of fragile creatures, without becoming morbid or indulging in the easy game of post-mortem ridicule barely disguising envy. They must combine the sometimes cruel objectivism of journalism with appreciation of the human condition, and perhaps even a dollop of that dangerous potion known as empathy. And all this with a sense of humour, black to ribald, wry to dry, never gratuitous.

Obituaries serve various purposes. The core is social history, one individual at a time, using the vector of one person's life to illuminate the situation of many. In this light, even eulogies, generally the nature of the
Globe and Mail
's “Lives Lived” column written by friends and family of “ordinary people,” fill in the blanks of the daily news, present and past. But there is also fascination in individuals alone: “In my view, there is no such thing as an uninteresting life, but there are badly researched and written accounts. The difference between humdrum and compelling rests in documenting weaknesses, celebrating strengths, and placing the people's lives in context of what else was happening here and abroad,” says Martin. She demonstrates that well in this volume, including individuals of meager fame but telling detail.

The devil may be in the wings for some of Martin's subjects, but the devil is in the details when it comes to the facts of dead people's lives. Her career in daily journalism gives Sandra Martin a properly obsessive concern for accuracy and “the whole truth” — meaning contextual information that illuminates motivation and constraints. She has gone beyond the
Globe and Mail
's published obituaries in these portraits, adding considerable information based on additional sources (and adding several individuals to boot). In effect, her newspaper obituaries served as the first draft of these biographies, tight to be sure, but rounded and deepened beyond the constraints wrought by deadlines and short notice. “Noteworthy people always die late in the afternoon,” she writes with an eye to the first edition, contributing to the “immediacy and finality” of the job, which she describes as “terrifying.” If so, her terror bans complacency, and finality turns out to be an illusion. She has returned to these stories even more convincingly with the assistance of time.

Obituary writers perform acts of resurrection in the immediate context of internment. That is why the craft can be so delicate and dangerous, speaking truth to grief, exposing intimacies at the precise moment when intimacies can be most wounding. This is where both tact and courage come into play, abetted by allusion sometimes, but sometimes unavoidably not. “I am writing for the readers, not the family.” Thus of Scott Symons, Martin reports with literary punch: “His life was his art. Alas it was not a masterpiece.” Her compilation of the facts supports such conclusions in all too many lives.

Sandra Martin brings a deeply observant and informed mind to her subjects, rooted in years of experience as a journalist, author, and citizen. Her references draw on her own memory of life in Canada over the past half-­century or so, enriching the insights she brings to each story. If you knew these people, you will utter sounds of recognition in reading the accounts of their individuality and times. And you will appreciate Sandra Martin's elegant and surgical use of the language in restoring life to the dead in the garment of literature.

William Thorsell

Toronto, Ontario

June 2012

Introduction

Five Myths about the Dead Beat

S
OME OF YOU
may think that writing obituaries is an odd — perhaps even whacky — occupation for an able-bodied journalist. After all, I could be chasing fires, sniffing out political sleaze, or even waxing editorial about the state of the nation. I used to feel that way too, I confess, until I changed sides from writing about the living to documenting the dead.

I've grown accustomed to the arched eyebrow, the flash of revulsion, the involuntary step backwards, and the exclamation “But that's so morbid” when I tell people what I do for a living. I ignore cracks about the “Siberia of journalism,” pointed queries about who's “on your slab today,” and the oh-so-clever jokes:
How's life on the dead beat? What's happening in God's anteroom?
As for the real killer — metaphorically speaking — “Why would you want to write about dead people? They're finished,” I smile mordantly and murmur, “I'll keep that in mind
if I write your obituary.”

Most journalists have a beat — crime, fashion, arts, health, business, politics. Obituaries encompass all those areas and more, because everybody, from scientists to visual artists, comes under my scrutiny eventually. My tenure as the
Globe and Mail
's chief obituary writer has taught me that writing obituaries is the most interesting and often the most terrifying job on any newspaper.

Aside from learning something new every day, which is the spur driving most journalists to get out of bed in the morning, the dead beat has another decided advantage: You never repeat yourself. Literally. That is one of the aspects that appealed to me about obituaries after several years in the arts section writing about books and authors.

On the obituaries desk there is no next year, no next book, no next achievement, no new angle. An obituary is the final word on a subject's life — until a posthumous biography appears several years down the road. Getting it right, therefore, is daunting, given the urgency of the 24/7 news cycle.

That's one of the reasons why I have written this book. I wanted to produce a second draft of the lives of fifty Canadians who died in the first decade of this century. Some of them I wrote amid a blur of phone calls and Internet searches; some I didn't write about at all because they died when I was away or on other assignments. I'm calling these biographical portraits “lives” because they don't adhere to the rigid deadline and format constraints of the traditional newspaper obituary. They are a bit more expansive, a bit more personal, and a bit more reflective.

ALTHOUGH MY SUBJECTS
all died between 2000 and 2010, their lives span the twentieth century, beginning with head-tax survivor Ralph Lung Kee Lee. Born in 1900, he sailed to Canada when he was twelve with two younger cousins, all of them wearing identifying tags around their necks. Mabel Grosvenor, who was born five years later, was the granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell. As a small child she watched the earliest attempts at manned flight in this country, at Bell's estate in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.

Many of my subjects are famous, others are known only to a coterie of admirers and family members, but each has done something to shape this country in big ways or small. They include politician Pierre Trudeau, hockey legend Maurice “The Rocket” Richard, writer Mordecai Richler, social activist June Callwood, Native rights advocate Donald Marshall, architect Arthur Erickson, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and Celia Franca, founder of the National Ballet of Canada. I have included rogues as well as champions. Both exist in life, and so too they reside between the covers of a book that uses obituaries to comment on Canadian society. Taken together, they contribute to a composite picture of Canadian politics and society in the twentieth century, from before the First World War to the Internet age.

You will note that men outnumber women. That was still the reality in the late twentieth century, not in numbers but in opportunities for women. One of my subjects, Bertha Wilson, was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. As I write, in April 2012, four of the nine judges on the Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, are women. That change has been a long time coming. We need more women in public life, more female politicians and corporate leaders, if the gender balance is to be redressed in a future anthology of Canadian obituaries.

It isn't just the country that has changed over the lifetimes of the fifty Canadians I have chronicled in this book. Obituary writing itself has also been transformed. Once the preserve of the rich, the noble, and the worthy, obituaries now encompass scoundrels as well as saints, eccentrics as well as celebrities. The style has changed as much as the subjects. There is a new frankness, an unwillingness to camouflage warts under layers of unctuous hyperbole and — thanks to technology — fresh, innovative ways to augment obituaries with photographs, interviews, and even videos.

Technology is a tool, but, for all the advantages of downloads and social networking opportunities, there are also ethical dangers lurking in cyberspace. Even while embracing technological wizardry we must safeguard the journalistic principles that gave authority to print obituaries. Balancing speed versus credibility and objectivity versus melodrama are huge considerations if we are to keep the best of print in new narrative modes geared to a younger and more expansive audience.

WHEN I STARTED
on the dead beat, editors wanted the definitive obituary in the next morning's paper even if the gap between my subject's last breath and the deadline to send the page to the printers was ludicrously short. Too bad if a worthy Canadian had the bad luck to die late in the day, or at the same moment when a world leader succumbed to a heart attack or a rock star injected a fatal overdose. A few lines below the fold, cobbled together from a wire service, was probably the best the poor departed's family could expect to read through their tears at breakfast the next morning. Whatever could be scrabbled together became the final word.

Consequently, the whiff of death catapulted reporters into default mode. They would hit the phones, gathering quotes like black bunting from anybody and everybody willing to comment. Often these reaction pieces told you a lot about friends and family members but offered little concrete or coherent information about the subject.

Now it is more likely that a news story announcing the death of a significant person will break on the Web and the obituary will follow at a pace that sometimes seems too leisurely, even to me.
They are still dead
is the crude but accurate rationalization for scheduling major obituaries as the “big read” for Saturday, because weekend circulation figures generally dwarf the number of weekday subscribers.

Having more time to research and think about a life — although the more important the person, the faster inevitably the turnaround — is a windfall of “the Web is for news, the paper is for analysis” syndrome. The combination of the newsflash on the Web with the promise of “full obituary to follow” in the paper allows for more thoughtful and accurate obituaries, the kind that people want to clip and preserve for second and even third readings. That is one of the continuing pleasures of printed obituaries.

AT THE BEGINNING
of this chapter I said that I had the most interesting job in the newsroom. There is another reason my job is so compelling. I am writing obituaries at a pivotal moment in a long and venerable tradition — the transition from print to digital. Long gone are the days when newspapers published several editions a day to break news and update stories. Many local dailies, especially in the United States, have merged or shut down.

Even now at a robust news organization such as the
Globe and Mail
, news flashes occur on the Web and are often digitally updated, as quickly as you can hit the Refresh button. Analysis, background features, and wide-ranging commentary — some of it curated from other news agencies or websites — have replaced breaking news as the mainstay of the morning newspaper.

The immediacy and the voracious appetite of the 24/7 news cycle, along with the informality and the way gossip dressed up as news goes viral around the globe on social media, has affected everything about the way I do my job. That's why a key component of this book is the history and craft of writing obituaries, from the printing press to the Internet age. I don't think there is another area of journalism that has undergone such a dramatic change in style and form. Those changes are largely unheralded, so I would like to lift the shroud and discuss the problems and pleasures, the pressures and rewards of writing obituaries.

Let me begin by dispelling five myths about the dead beat.

Myth Number One: The Dead Beat Is a Dead End

AFTER I WAS
appointed to the
Globe
's obituary beat, a colleague several years my senior approached me with a wistful look and confided that he had thought seriously about applying for the job.

“Why didn't you?” I asked.

“I thought I still had a few good stories in me before I was put on the shelf,” he replied with the kind of candour that probably explains his long list of former wives and girlfriends.

That's the way it used to be on the dead beat: obituaries were the domain of junior reporters and old-timers waiting for their pensions or a buyout. Author Tom Rachman describes an over-the-hill obituary writer in his novel
The Imperfectionists
: “It has been nine days since his last obit, and he hopes to extend the streak. His overarching goal at the paper is indolence, to publish as infrequently as possible and to sneak away when no one is looking.”

Obituary writing has changed. “The last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first will be looked on as a golden age for newspaper obituaries,” according to James Fergusson, the inaugural obituaries editor of the
Guardian
. “The rules have all changed: once an obscure genre, obituaries are now a necessary weapon in any serious paper's armoury,” he argues in “Last Words,” an essay in the
London Library Magazine
. Why? The answer is simple: the Internet encouraged the formation of obituary websites and discussion groups in which readers and writers could read, comment on obituaries, and connect with each other around the world.

Unlike British newspapers, there really wasn't an obituary beat or even a dedicated obituary editor at most North American newspapers before the 1960s. News editors would look around the newsroom and assign obituaries to whomever was available. Seasoned reporters were reluctant to take them on because anonymity ruled, as it still does in most quality papers in the U.K. No matter how sparkling your prose, how diligent your research, how incisive your commentary, there was no byline to give you credit for a job well done. As John L. Hess noted in a 1985
Grand Street
article, “On the Death Watch at the
Times
,” writing obituaries was a mug's game, for “editors would no more identify [the reporter] than they would the embalmer.”

The situation was even worse when it came to writing advances — the obituaries that news organizations like to have prewritten in case a famous person dies suddenly. Reporters, accustomed to seeing their efforts immortalized in print within hours or minutes, could update an obituary three or four times, retire, or even die themselves before the subject of an advance obituary finally breathed his or her last breath.

Reluctance to research and write a story that might not appear for years, and even then wouldn't add to a reporter's pool of credited stories, gave obituaries a bad rap. Consequently, editors began handing out these assignments to junior reporters as a training ground in writing fast human-interest stories about local worthies, expecting a minimum of research and a few hasty phone calls to friends and next of kin.

That was the management theory, but writing obituaries unleashed the hidden writer in many a novice journalist, including the celebrated long-form writer Gay Talese, acclaimed author of several books, one of the founders of “new journalism,” and a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer whose numerous profiles — including such classics as “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and “[Muhammad] Ali in Havana” — are routinely taught in magazine and journalism classes. Back in the mid-1950s he worked for the
New York Times
as a junior political reporter, covering the state legislature in Albany, New York. He floundered so badly that his editors “punished” him by reassigning him to write obituaries. “I was never happier,” he wrote in “When I Was Twenty-Five,” a memoir essay. “Obituary writing was in the realm of personal history, biography, a summation of an individual's worth and consequence, and anyone who commanded an obituary in the
Times
was doubtless an individual of distinction and singular achievement — which was considerably more than I had seen during my brief career.”

After a decade as an investigative reporter, Jim Nicholson reluctantly took on the dead beat, becoming the first obituary writer at the
Philadelphia Daily News
in 1982. More than twenty-five years later he could still remember how the “faces of my long time colleagues betrayed expressions people can't hide when looking at a terminal patient with that ‘there but for the grace of God go I' look in their eyes.”

Nicholson carved out his own niche according to a formula worked out with Tom Livingston, the paper's managing editor. “The newsroom handles the big guys, Nicholson writes about the nobodies,” Nicholson recalled in “The Making of an Obituary Writer — and a Man,” an article for the fall 2006 edition of
Nieman Reports
. “I started writing obits like they were personal columns, with a lot of subjective slants on philosophy, religion, cabbages, and kings, all meant to enhance the life, times, and character of the deceased.” By the time Nicholson retired in 2001, he considered obits not only “the best job” he had ever had in journalism but also one that had vanquished his journalistic cynicism and made him believe that “most men and women are good; most when given a chance will do right; most will show honor.”