Back when I got started in newspapers, obituary writing was boot camp for young reporters, and you sank or survived based on your ability to distinguish “grew up” from “born in” and knowing what BPOE stands for.
Obituaries were carefully-constructed, detail-laden, rule-driven writing that never deviated from an established formula guaranteeing the well-known and the unknown an opportunity to have their lives summed up in a few inches of type.
Famous people merited appreciation pieces. But obituaries were the great leveler, reducing childhood, education, career, interests, and family to a formulaic description.
In a small daily newspaper, obituaries were written on the overnight shift with reporters like yours truly making the rounds of police stations to assemble the police log and turning out obituaries faxed to the newsroom by funeral homes and sometimes phoned in by a funeral director.
During my turn in the obituary cauldron, the late Frederick H. Goddard was the drillmaster who loomed over obit writers when they handed in sloppy products and stared in silence at the hapless failures who dared to misspell the deceased’s name.
A history lover who traveled to many of the places he read about, Goddard was a master at finding and extracting the obituary subject’s personality and the place they occupied in the world from information provided by a funeral home.
He understood that obituaries were the final summation of lives well and gently lived or terminated suddenly, or too soon. He knew what obituaries meant to grieving families. He knew their value as a resource future reporters could dig into decades after they were written.
I remember Fred grilling a colleague about an obituary that mentioned the deceased visiting East Africa in the 1930s. “Do you suppose,” he said in a tone dripping acid, “that he might have been serving with the Italian army?”
I was thinking this week about the obituary craft and Fred Goddard’s uncompromising insistence on excellence while reading Annette (Thistle) Phinney and Amanda Blaney’s obituaries (Item, April 28).
Both obituaries strayed continents away from the strict rules hammered home by Goddard. But they told brief-yet-beautiful stories about the two women. Thistle Phinney (what a beautiful New Englandy name) called Searsport, Maine home before her family moved to a farm next to Lynn Woods, living on a street now named for her father, Hume Thistle.
“Annette and her two twin brothers built their family homes beside the original farm house they grew up in to be close to their parents and each other,” said the obituary.
How much more do you need to know about a person that isn’t contained in that description? But if you needed more, Phinney’s obituary described her love for family and animals.
Blaney’s life was much shorter than Phinney’s. But her obituary suggests she was a kindred soul, sharing Phinney’s love of animals and fun pastimes that made her happy.
“Simple life, simple pleasures, no pressure, no stress.” Boy, wouldn’t most of us like to lay claim to that epitaph?
Fred Goddard would have frowned at the free-wheeling tone describing Phinney and Blaney’s lives. But he would have appreciated the way the writing shined a light on two beautiful lives.
Thor Jourgensen can be reached at [email protected].