In 2003, we ran an obituary of Stephen N. Jones, 82, a Rockville physician who must have been one of the last doctors in the Washington area to have made house calls a regular part of his practice. His record was 51 in a single day. We wrote about a Foreign Service officer named Christopher P. English, whose avocation was commercial airline travel. On long weekends, he'd book passage on a round-trip flight to Asia or around the world, just for the fun of flying. Rarely did he leave the airport once his plane landed. He just got the next flight out. He was said to have logged more than a million miles of air travel. English died at 48 in 2000.
If there were an obituary "love is patient" award, mine would go to Ruth Hull Bennett, who put off marriage for two decades while she pursued a professional career. Bennett died at the age of 101 in 1998. As a college student in Iowa, she'd accepted a classmate's marriage proposal. But then she went off to medical school, became a physician and founded a Quaker hospital in India that she directed for several years. When she returned to the United States, her old beau, miraculously, was waiting. They married, and for the next 25 years she was a wheat farmer's wife in Colorado. She moved to Sandy Spring in 1979 and at 90 won a gold medal in her age group in the 1,500-meter race-walk in the Maryland Senior Olympics.
I'll not forget Alan Marks, a Washington stockbroker who learned he had terminal cancer in 1997. Marks planned his memorial service. But he hated the idea of missing it, so he held it before he died. He called it a "celebration of life" and invited 500 people. It was held Feb. 16, 1998, at the University of Maryland chapel. Marks died less than three weeks later, on March 6. "Please smile about my life. It was a full and good one," he said in a statement read at his grave. He was 59.
I would love to have met Eloise Randolph Page, a stereotypical steel magnolia. She was white-gloved and proper, a quintessential lady of Old Virginia who traced her ancestry to Colonial times; a former Sunday school teacher and chief of the flower committee and Altar Guild at Christ Episcopal Church in Georgetown, where she demanded perfection in the ironing of altar linens. In her professional identity, Page was a top clandestine operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was known as the "Iron Butterfly." She was the CIA's first woman station chief, and her station was Athens, where terrorists had assassinated a predecessor. The CIA did not want us to say where Page had served, but it was hard to see how this would have harmed national security. Half the people at her church knew. A CIA friend told me the agency's problem: "We deny we have a station in Athens," he said.
Those who write obituaries learn the truth of the old proverb that "success has many fathers while failure is an orphan." For years, it seemed, we were always writing about scientists who had played key roles in the development of the atomic bomb, which helped the United States win World War II. We must have written a dozen obituaries of men and women who helped create modern computer technology. When Carlton R. Sickles (D), a former Maryland congressman and longtime Metro board member, died in January 2004, he was widely eulogized as a "father" of the Washington area Metrorail system. At least two other men also claimed to have been the "father" of Metro.
We rarely were asked to write about the fatherhood of projects, ideas and ventures that ended badly. We wrote about the NASA scientists who worked on the Apollo and other successful space missions but little or nothing about those who worked on the Challenger, which exploded in January 1986, killing all seven crew members. We ran few, if any, obituaries of the automotive engineers who participated in the creation of Ford's disastrous Edsel.
In our dealings with families and friends of the departed -- the primary sources of information in most of our obituaries -- we tried to tread carefully. Most of them were having bad days, and many were prone to exaggerated notions of how very good the person who died really was. Often they could remember only what they wanted to remember. Sometimes they remembered things that never happened. They were bound to be disappointed in the obituaries we produced.
Ex-wives were among the few exceptions to this truth. They tended to be realistic about their former husbands. They did not expect us to write the obituary of a saint. In fact, they did not want us to. One of the more unusual complaints of my obituary-writing career came from an ex-wife who said I had failed to describe how bad her ex-husband really was. His second wife, however, loved the obituary I wrote. She sent me flowers. A colleague suggested I send them along to the first wife, but it seemed this would only rub salt into her wounds.
Many ex-wives wanted to be left out of their former husbands' obituaries, but this we could not do. We reasoned that an obituary should be a summary of the principal events in a life, and a marriage is a principal event. This explanation appeared to satisfy most of the ex-wives with whom I spoke but not all. I remember one woman who was especially apprehensive.
"What are you going to say?" she asked.
"We'll say his marriage to you ended in divorce," I said.
She was relieved. "I only want everyone to know I divorced him," she said.
Depending on families and friends for our obituary information, we were not always sure we were getting the full story. There were times when we could not tell whether relevant, but embarrassing, facts were being left out. But there also were times when it was obvious that something was missing.
One obituary in particular stands out. It was of a man whose résumé included an Ivy League college degree, service in the Marine Corps and the CIA and a stint as an executive with an advertising agency. For the last 15 years of his career, he was a letter carrier. Something clearly was missing from that picture. The man also was an alcoholic whose addiction had cost him his white-collar career. But in the end, he defeated his alcoholism. He quit drinking, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and died a sober man. We included this in the obituary, and it made it a much better story.
In any story about a life, the subject is one of the best sources of information, but in obituaries, that person usually was unavailable. Occasionally we did interview public figures whose obituaries we were preparing in advance. Two men I spoke with about their obituaries were Clark M. Clifford, the former secretary of defense and quintessential Washington insider; and S. Dillon Ripley II, the longtime secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Clifford, in particular, was talkative. He said he was delighted to be able to contribute firsthand to his obituary. Unfortunately for him, he would have much preferred the one I prepared immediately after our interview to the one that was published. He was 79 when we met in his law office in downtown Washington in 1986 to discuss his obituary, which as initially written described him as a trusted confidant and counselor to presidents, and a wise and able helmsman to anyone needing help in navigating the corridors of power in Washington.
But Clifford lived 12 more years and in that period became embroiled in a banking scandal related to the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Charges of fraud, conspiracy and bribe-taking eventually were set aside on grounds of his old age and failing health, but they nevertheless figured prominently in his obituary when he died at 91 in October 1998.
Ripley was amused at the thought of discussing his obituary. I had written him a note asking for a meeting and he wrote back, signing his reply "the late Dillon Ripley." We spent a pleasant afternoon talking about his love of ornithology; his explorations and travels to remote parts of the world; and his years as chief of the Smithsonian Institution, which he liked to call "the nation's attic." He died at 87 in 2001.
It was traditional at The Post to include in obituaries memberships and associations of the person who had died. These ranged from religious to social and fraternal. There were such professional groups as the Alexander Graham Bell chapter of the Telephone Pioneers of America, to which it seemed every C&P Telephone Co. retiree belonged. We often wondered what telephone pioneers did when they got together. We had similar questions about Mensa, the club for the super-intelligent. Did they play three-dimensional chess? One member told me they mainly talked about how smart they were.
Some of these groups had exotic-sounding names -- Ancient Arabic Order, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine comes to mind. But listing these memberships was mostly routine work, and often it was boring. Still, we had to be careful. Mistakes were embarrassing at best and often hurtful. Several years ago, a colleague, intending to describe someone as having been a member of the Clans of Scotland, wrote instead that he was a member of the Klans of Scotland, apparently thinking subconsciously of the white-hooded "invisible empire" that terrorized blacks, civil rights workers and others in the American South. Fortunately, an alert copy editor spotted the gaffe and corrected it before it got in the paper.
Would that obituary writers were always that fortunate. I once misattributed the authorship of a short story written by W. Somerset Maugham to Henry James, and I heard about it for months. A colleague once got the date and location wrong for the sinking of a Japanese battleship during World War II, and we were inundated with demands for a correction, which we ran in the next day's paper. At least the corrections kept us humble, or they should have. The good news was that they also told us our stories were being read.
Somebody cared about every single obituary we wrote.
