The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson

Author:Marilyn Johnson [Johnson, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The story of Zielony’s survival and immigration to the Pacific Northwest, and his life helping other Polish Catholics survive, was one of those great obituaries that are made to be reread. Dark and gritty, but suffused with spirit, it was written by someone inspired. Amy Martinez Starke read about Jim Nicholson’s obits back in the eighties and “made a mental note that I might want to do that someday.” The time came in 2002, when Starke, who has been a journalist for twenty-five years, proposed writing three feature-style obits of ordinary people a week. It was “an easy sell. My managing editor had been aware of other papers and knew it was very popular with the readers.” The Oregonian had also been one of the newspapers syndicating Portraits of Grief after 9/11. After the first week of Portraits, the editor tried to stop reprinting them, but there was an outcry from readers and staff members alike. Portraits stayed. The next step, longer Portrait-influenced obits of the ordinary people of Oregon, was a natural.

The Oregonian has always run the equivalent of paid obits, except they give the space away. These free agate-type obits are written up using forms filled out by the survivors, with information about how old the person was, what she did for a living, and so on. Starke and the other Life Story obit writer, Joan Harvey, browse through stacks of these and choose subjects from the forms. Starke is a busy woman; she and her husband have two teenagers, one applying to colleges and one in the band, and her obits are labor intensive. She has to be efficient, but she lavishes time gathering raw information. “My general rule of thumb is no less than five interviews per story, usually closer to ten. The writing doesn’t take much time, but the interviews, they can be at least an hour—and, yes, everything by phone.” The distance is crucial. She says she couldn’t do this for someone she knows.

“Do I feel a mission? Oh, yes, to increase circulation. That’s the bottom line. If people would take the paper for one thing, for the Life Stories, I’d feel like I’ve fulfilled my mission here. If journalists feel they have any other mission, I think they’re misguided. Without newspapers we’re not going to have anyplace to write.”

Her businesslike approach is in contrast to her soulful writing. Her ordinary people are complex and emotional, written about from a distance that’s hard to pin down. Where is the author? Sometimes it seems she’s chatting about the story over coffee, gossiping: “Sister Anne was a card player and could play pinochle for hours on vacation in Lincoln City with other nuns, after morning prayers. She was known for taking a little whiskey neat….” Other times, the author lays out the string of details and biographical information, but she seems to be spinning tales from the spooky distance of a nineteenth-century novel, or a legend:

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