Monday, March 18, 2024

Malachy McCourt

Malachy McCourt made it to one more St. Patrick's Day, just not the latest one in 2024. He passed away on March 11, 2024, just before this year's celebration.

Even if Malachy wasn't Frank McCourt's slightly younger brother, he would he no less of a character, and would still deserve the six column, half page tribute he got in the March 12, 2023 print edition of the New York Times by Sam Roberts. 

Brother Frank was the high school creative writing teacher at Stuyvesant High school who famously blossomed late in life as an author who earned a Pulitzer Prize for his memoir of his mother and family life in Limerick, Ireland, "Angela's Ashes." I don't think any dry eyes finished reading that book.

The New York Times wrote a profile piece of the ailing Malachy on March 10,2023 when Malachy was hoping to make it to just one more St. Patrick's Day. In 2022 Malachy was ailing in a hospice, but not ailing fast enough to be discharged into the hearse parked out back. He was discharged from hospice care to home care, so he did make it to 2023's St. Patrick's Day, but not 2024's. Unless you die on St. Patrick's Day your are destined to die in between St. Patrick Days.

Malachy pretty much made it through life in the United States full of blarney, which of course is baloney with a brogue which pretty much let him get away with just about anything he told you. Facts never got in the way of a good story, and why should they? It may not still be a good story then.

I never met Malachy, or saw him in an East Side watering hole. But I know his kind. Years and years ago the former NYC city councilman Matthew Troy was giving a talk to us auditors on ethics of all topics at Empire BlueCross and BlueShield.

I may have been the only one in the gathering who was old enough to know that Matthew Troy was disbarred as a convicted felon for embezzling from his clients' accounts. He did 55 days in jail and was now out long enough to petition to get his law license back.

Now Matthew Troy was not from Ireland, but he was Irish-American enough to tell one entertaining story after another, all contemporaneously.

My favorite one was that as Queens County (one of NYC's 5 boroughs/counties) Democratic party head he had a say in who got nominated to judgeships in the county. One afternoon a retired NYPD police captain makes an appointment to see Mattie. He puts a briefcase on Mattie's desk, opens it, revealing the money it is filled with.

The retired police captain tells Mattie, "I want to be a judge." Mattie, in his telling, thinks for just a bit, then asks the retired police captain, "are you at least a lawyer?"

Mattie closed his talk with his motto: "I always tell the truth, unless I can't." I never forgot it.

Malachy was an unelected Matthew Troy. He was a gadabout (you're not going to come across that word too often.) as described in his obit headline:  

Malachy McCourt, a Memoirist, Actor and Gadabout, Dies at 92

A gadabout indeed. Arriving from Limerick after his brother Frank sent him $200 to get here, he had jobs as diverse as: dishwasher, dockworker, Bible salesman on Fire Island, (words you never thought would be seen on the same line) soldier, writer, actor, radio personality. The novelist Frank Conroy said of Malachy: "he was professional Irishman, for which he can hardly be blamed," since "Irishness was all he had." I remember him a bit from his WBAI radio show

There doesn't seem to have been any animosity between Malachy  and his brother Frank. Malachy would tell anyone who listened, "I was blamed for not being my brother. I now pledge to all those naysayers that someday I will write "Angela's Ashes" and change my name to Frank McCourt."

Malachy played a bartender as a recurring role on the soap opera "Ryan's Hope" and was the real thing as the owner of what the obit tells us was the first singles bar in the 1950s: Malachy's on the Upper East Side.

I never heard that one, but it would be very interesting to have what could be considered to be a "singles bar" in the 1950s when most bars in New York City had a policy of not serving unescorted women at he bar, lest they be hookers looking for Johns. In the late '60s I noticed a hardly visible sign tucked behind a Blarney Stone bar that no unescorted women would be served.

If Matthew Troy liked to say he always told the truth unless he couldn't, Malachy would tell you, "I couldn't wait to hear what I had to say next."

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Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Dead Are Waiting

The dead are waiting for traffic to ease before the story of their lives can make it to the pint pages of The New York Times. 

The obit desk is churning out so many obits that more appear online than in print. There's a backlog from the online pages to the print pages. It's like a morning traffic report that there are 30-40 minute delays getting though the Holland or Lincoln Tunnels and getting over the George Washington Bridge—upper or lower levels. Do the barely living need to be discouraged from dying? Will obit congestion pricing go into effect?

I have access to the NYT online edition through my home delivery subscription. I use the online editions for browsing and reference. At 75 I'm a creature for the print edition, and only look at the online edition to see what might hit the print edition. There is a lag.

Of the latest 11 online obits, 4 do not show anywhere as being in a print edition. Of the several from March 15—a day with six! tribute obits—there are two that appear in Sunday's, March 17 print edition. I purposely do not get the Sunday print edition. I have enough to do with doing newspaper deep dives than to add Sunday's pile to the mix. The home delivery people do however add the magazine,  Book Review, Arts, Metropolitan and Real Estate sections with my Saturday print delivery at no extra charge. So I already get about half of the Sunday edition to go through, but not the section with obituaries.

Last week I read a print Wall Street Journal story on J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ben Cohen. There was a reference to the name "Bethe" toward the end of the print edition that I could not find anywhere in all of the preceding text where the name had been mentioned. I looked many times and couldn't find it. 

When I dove into the online edition for the piece the name Hans Bethe was mentioned three times before the reference at the end. WTF?

I emailed Mr. Cohen and he responded nicely that they have to make cuts to the print size of a piece, and obviously made too deep a cut with what finally appeared in print. He promised they'd try and do better. Print space seems finite; but online space is not

It's kind of great that there are so many tribute obits to read, and it also seems better that they don't all appear as soon as they're ready to read in the print edition.

Unless the NYT adds a dedicated obituary section to compensate for their truncated New York sports coverage from The Athletic,  I guess there will now always be a delay before the online obits get the space to appear in the print editions.

The notable dead will just have to wait their turn at the tunnels and bridges to cross the river and get into the print edition of the NYT.

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Kerplunk

You knew right from the start it couldn't work, the 2000 merger of AOL and Time Warner. Not when Steve Case,  the C.E.O. for AOL, the dot com company, shows up at the announcement wearing a tie, and Gerald Levin, the Time Warner C.E.O. of the historic entertainment and media behemoth, shows up without wearing a tie. Can't tell from the photo if Gerald's also wearing jeans, which would have only been worse.

As soon as the word "synergy' escaped someone's lips, the entire deal was destined to be a Harvard Business School case study, And not because of its success.

As bad as the deal became, it especially put a catastrophic crimp in Ted Turner's net worth. The obit writer for the NYT, Chris Kornelis, tells us:

By the start of 2002, AOL Time Warner's market value was hovering around  $127 billion. The year, the company posted a net loss of $98.7 billion, a record for a U.S. company. Ted Turner, the company's largest individual shareholder at the time of merger, later told The New York Times that the deal had cost him 80 percent of his worth, about $8 billion. Mr. Levin resigned in 2002.

Ted Turner did have a good start to the new millennium. His 10 marriage to Jane Fonda imploded in 2001, resulting in a settlement to Jane in the millions. I guess she didn't take him for better or worse. Who knew mismatched dressed C.E.O.s might have scuttled Ted's marriage.

In 1997 Ted famously donated $1 billion to the U.N. Good thing it preceded the AOL Time Warner merger by a few years.

The obit tells us that Gerald Levin was seen as a media genius by having HBO be the first cable outlet to use satellites to provide national access to the cable company's offerings. Mr. Levin was quoted  as saying in James Andrew Miller's book "Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers" (2021):

"The only way you get ahead is if you see something that no one else sees and it's a little bit crazy." [See "Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson]

As the expected "synergy" (there's word you won't hear too often these days.) did not materialize, the analysts pointed out how mismatched the C.E.O.s were.

It was said by Mr. Miller, the author of "Tinderbox," that Levin "was the last person that central casting would've sent over" to run the world's largest media company. Levin "was an intellectual who liked to quote the Bible and the French philosopher Albert Camus."

AOL Time Warner dropped "AOL" from its name in 2003 and in 2009 Time Warner spun off the AOL unit to shareholders with a market capitalization of $3.5 billion.

Poor Gerald. He should've worn a tie that day.

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Friday, March 15, 2024

The Office As a Person

If an office was a person, Joe Franklin's office would be a bum.

So said William Whitworth, a "venerated profile writer and editor" who has just passed away at 87 when he wrote a 1971 New Yorker profile piece on Joe Franklin, who I'm call Mr. Memory Lane.

Sam Roberts in the New York Times gives Mr. Whitworth the 21-gun salute of tribute obits across 6 columns, with two photos. spread over more than half a page in this past Monday's print edition.

It is said a picture is worth a thousand words, and the downloaded photo of Joe in his office makes it clear that Mr. Whitworth was not exaggerating.  Oddly enough, the photo I chose shows Joe at the stage of his life closely resembling my father in size, dress, pose and stature. The resemblance is uncanny to me. My wife agrees as well.

The photo of Joe surrounded by what is likely huge amounts of Broadway ephemera is nothing but a cluttered closet compared to how the Collyer Brothers lived. They were the famous hoarders who in the 1940s stuffed their East Harlem mansion with so much clutter that they were found dead buried in it, 15 days apart. A news report from the era gives you a small idea of their hoarding.

On March 21, 1947, an anonymous tip sent authorities to the Collyer brothers' mansion in Harlem. NYPD officers found the dead body of one of the brothers amongst the 120 tons of trash they had collected. It would be another 15 days before authorities found the other brother buried underneath a collapsed pile of trash

Joe didn't shoe-horn a piano and large parts of a car into his office, and at least he was able to move around and go in and out. The brothers were hoarders as well as reclusive. At one point Joe had a restaurant in the theater district where he greeted the theater-going crowd with stories and sometimes risqué jokes.

My own working space here at home is called the "computer room." There are two desks and a desktop computer where the writing is done. The room is filled with so many pictures there is no more wall space to hang them from. The floor serves an easel for the overflow.

My wife calls me a hoarder, but I think that word overstates my proclivity for saving newspaper clippings. There are boxes of saved clippings that I admit I will probably never go through, but that I still want. She managed to convince me that she could toss one of the boxes found in a small closet to make room for Christmas stuff. I have no idea what I'm missing, but I still feel a bit of pain that I no longer have that box. I'm convinced it held many Russell Baker Observer columns. Oh well.

I still actively clip newspaper stories, in particular ones that have lead me to write a posting, like the recent obituary for William Whitworth.

Mr. Whitworth apparently worked at The Herald Tribune back in the day with Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Dick Schaap. I still miss The Herald Tribune: news, sports, editorial cartoons and just plain cartoons. To this day I still miss Our Miss Peach.

The Herald Tribune wobbled after the 114 day newspaper strike by the typesetters in 1962-1963. The president of Typographical Union No. 6, Bertram Powers, knew the typesetter jobs were doomed by the advancing ability of a computer that could direct the formation of type rather than huge, clunky linotype machines. Word processing as we know it was coming to the newspaper industry.

Up till then New York City had 8 dailies. Mergers occurred after, one coming from the combination of The Herald Tribune, World Telegram &Sun, and the Journal American: The World Journal Tribune.

A New Yorker cartoon of the era (This was NOT easily copied, despite owning two discs of complete New Yorker cartoons.) showed a massively elongated news truck that resembled the longest of stretch limos with the words World Journal Tribune... on the side. Nightly news that was 15 minutes at 11 o' clock went to a half hour. The dawn of televised news was creeping up over the horizon. Print news media has been shrinking ever since.

Mr. Whitworth however wasn't out of a job. The became a highly respected editor at The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He also wrote profile pieces, like the one he did of Joe Franklin. He might have been the only person who could tolerate The New Yorker's prickly editor William Shawn without resorting to physical violence.

For myself, I never heard of Mr. Whitworth, shown in the obit seated below a blowup of his Joe Franklin profile piece, appropriately holding a pencil for editing. I've read plenty of pieces by Robert Caro, Pauline Kael and other writers he's edited, but never knew of the man behind the curtain.

How nice it would have been to meet him. It's never going to happen now, but I would love to see what a top-flight editor would do to my postings. I might be advised to just concentrate on my other hobbies.

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Flaco the Owl. Rest In Peace

Up to now I haven't had enough words in my head to write about the passing of Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl with the 12 foot wingspan. As anyone who has been following social media and newscasts from New York City knows by now, Flaco, who escaped from his vandalized enclosure at the Central Park Zoo on February 2, 2023, has passed away on February 23, 2024. He met his fate by most likely flying into a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he was often seen.

It was at night, and perhaps his eyesight, his GPS and his radar failed him, but he was found dead as a Dodo in the courtyard of a building at 267 West 89th Street at around 5:00 P.M. There was no indication if he flew into an unforgiving window, or a solid side of building bricks. Did a TV with naked people get his attention? Did just naked people get his attention? It is not known how fast he was going, or from what height his systems failed him. 

He may not have even been flying when he went to his death. Initial findings state that Flaco died of "acute traumatic injury" mainly to the bird's body, but not his head. He may have just fallen from a high perch. Margaret Renki in the NYT outlines even more scenarios that could have caused his death. Full necropsy results will be weeks away. 

The New York Times did not do an obituary, but did of course report  his death. An obituary for a pet, public or private, might have been seen as going too far. It might set a bad precedent. I can never remember reading an obituary in the NYT for an animal.

There have however been animal obituaries from other sources. Ann Wroe in The Economist wrote about a deceased parrot, Alex, an African gray who was the subject of a 30-year psychology study. I had a friend who bought an African Grey for about $600 decades ago. He had heard that the African Greys could be taught to talk a lot. My friend lived in a lobby apartment in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. The bird didn't last too long, catching a cold by being too close to the drafty front door. It's too bad. A bird talking with a Brooklyn accent would have been unique.

The Times and other papers covered the memorial service that New Yorkers held for Flaco by what they thought was his favorite oak tree in Central Park. Poems were read, eulogies flowed, and flowers were placed at the base of the tree. 

Was Flaco just an owl who enjoyed his short-lived freedom flying around Manhattan, or was he something else, like a Chinese or a Russian drone outfitted with surveillance equipment by the perpetrator that set him free?

We all remember a Chinese spy balloon that was eventually shot down. Was Flaco the replacement? Did Flaco check out water supply sites by perching on water towers, of which there are many in Manhattan and report back? Fire escapes were another favorite perch of Flaco's—checking out escape routes for the population in case of an emergency.

Flaco was a living creature, not fiction. Living creatures meet with natural and unnatural ends. Take Superman. He flew all around Metropolis doing good deeds when needed.  Disguised as Clark Kent, a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, the Daily Planet, Clark as Superman shed his glasses, shoes and socks and suit in the men's room of the Daily Planet (or a phone booth—look it up if you don't know what that is.) and leaped out of a hallway window, cruising over the city until he got where the help was needed.

His colleague Lois Lane always suspected Clark was Superman, because Clark could never be found when Superman appeared. Why Lois, being a brassy chic with major cojones didn't just check the men's room was something I never understood, even as a kid. 

Superman was vulnerable to Kryptonite. It made him lose his powers and his x-ray vision. Mr. Renki points out that Flaco could have become poisoned by eating rodents infested with the poison meant to kill them. He could have also received lead poisoning from eating the pigeons he was fond of consuming to survive in the wild. If poisoned, he might have just lost his balance by compromised coordination.

When I heard of Flaco's death I thought for sure I was going to read they were going to taxiderm him and display him somewhere in the Central Park Zoo. That doesn't seem to be the case. Or maybe plans are still fluid and they'll create a statue. After all, Central Park has a statue of Balto, one of the lead huskies that traveled 674 miles in 1925 to deliver badly needed medical supplies to fight diphtheria during a blizzard in Alaska.

I miss Flaco, and I miss Superman. They both would have been able to fly over the gantries that hold the cameras that are going to soon impose congestion pricing on New York Manhattan drivers.

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Thursday, March 7, 2024

The Succsesor

The skien has been broken. A centenarian has passed away and a NYT tribute obituary was not written by Robert McFadden, but rather by Margalit Fox.

To anyone who reads and follows the NYT tribute obituaries this is not a surprise. The day this would happen was always coming. Robert McFadden is 87 years old, but is still with the paper, having started there in 1961. He is the dean of the reporters on the obituary staff, winning a Pulitzer in 1996 for Spot Reporting.  He has written so many obituaries that his pre-written ones are aging in the obituary wine cellar called the morgue, waiting for the subjects to pass away and having the vintage opened.

The subjects in many of these pre-written obits have aged into being octogenarians, nonagenarians, and even centenarians. When some notable passes away at these advanced ages, it's almost a 1/5 cinch that the byline will be McFadden's.

I have no idea how close we are to depleting all the McFadden obits, but we might be getting close when the obit for 101-year-old Juli Lynne Charlot was uncorked from the cellar and poured onto Wednesday's front page, below the fold.

Margalit Fox is no longer with the paper, having left a few years ago to write books, one of which I read—the one about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle solving a crime like his creation Sherlock Holmes.

I know when there is a lull in writing pieces on deadline for deceased notables, the obituary desk writers are assigned to update, or start pre-written obits for notables who are still with us, saving time for when that subject does finally leave us. I know Margalit got these assignments.

On Monday we were treated to a McFadden obit on 102-year-old Iris Apfel, a fashion icon unto herself. And now a day later, we have the life of 101-year-old Juli Lynne Charlot, creator of the poodle skirt, celebrated in an obit written by Margalit Fox delivered to the front page table—below the fold—from the obit wine cellar.

Both writers have their distinctive styles, McFadden shoehorning in so many facts of the person's life into the lede you almost don't have to read any further, but you always do, because the stream is taking you over the rapids.

Margalit is a little more playful, and when she can will have a lede that doesn't start with the usual subject's name, comma beginning. She's as close to being like the now long deceased Robert McG. Thomas Jr .who didn't live long enough to leave a body of pre-written obits behind, but did rather leave a book full of ones written on deadline for some of the great characters and ordinary notables that ever walked the earth.

Ms. Fox, being Jewish herself, can get away with a lede for Juli Lynne Charlot that goes: "What's a nice Jewish girl viscountess to do when she has a title but no money, a party invitation but no clothes and a pair of scissors but no sewing skills?

"Invent the poodle skirt, of course."

Everything we see and use was created by someone. We just don't usually know who, and most often don't care. Thus, all Bobby Soxers on American Bandstand in the 50s twirling around in their poodle skirts and Penny Marshall as Laverne DeFazio in Laverne and Shirley who proudly flounced around in her poodle skirt with the large scripted L on the front, owe homage to Ms. Charlot, who in December 1947 cut a huge piece of white felt into a circle with an opening at the top to step through, sewed some appliqués of Christmas tress on the skirt to fit the theme for the Christmas party, and attached it to her waist. And just like that she was a hit and created a fashion industry. 

Ms. Fox sneaks in an alternate meaning of "paid" when she tells us; "by the height of the Swinging Sixties the miniskirt had put paid to the poodle." Huh? 

I am not often sent to the OED for a definition, but this one stumped me. But there is was, the third definition of the noun "pay," labelled "fig" for figuratively, with the definitions, "retaliation, penalty, retribution, punishment..."

Ms. Fox's kicker at the end is almost ruined by a photo and a caption, but she mentions a quote by Erma Bombeck who wrote in a 1984 column, "when I was a teenager, every girl in the Western world wore a poodle skirt."

In 1951 a 25-year-old woman went to a hoedown celebration in Ottawa at the home of Canada's governor general wearing "a steel blue circle skirt by Ms Charlot that was appliquéd with hearts, flowering branches and stylized figures of Romeo and Juliet."

The woman was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor who would be known the next year as Queen Elizabeth II.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Iris Apfel

Robert McFadden's record for delivering tribute obituaries for the deceased who have lived passed 80, 90, and even 100 remains intact. Yesterday's print edition of the NYT delivers a six-column full color obit for Iris Apfel, 102, who passed away in Palm Beach, Florida.

This might be the first McFadden obit I've ever seen for a subject who was an eclectically dressed woman who was not a fashion designer, but rather a fashion design unto herself.

McFadden's lede is breathless: "a New York Society matron and interior designer who late in life knocked  the socks off the fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, found treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions..."

She did this wearing, seemingly all at once: "boxy multicolored Bill Blass jackets with tinted Hopi dancing skirts and hairy goatskin boots; fluffy evening coats of red and green rooster feathers with suede pants slashed to the knees, a rose angora sweater and a19th-century Chinese brocade panel skirt." And those were just some of the clothes. The accessories were another story.

I would have loved to have seen her on a NYC crosstown bus.

She may not have ridden a crosstown bus, but she was seen all over town. Her wardrobe was an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. The request from the Met for her clothing collection to be shown surprised her. She thought you had to be dead to be the subject of a show at the Met.

She started as a trained interior designer. She was born as Iris Barrel in Astoria, Queens in 1921 and married Carl Apfel an advertising executive in 1948. He passed away in 2015 at 100. There were no children.

Together Iris and her husband formed a company called Old World Weavers that restored drapes at the White House for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.

She sold scarves, bangles and beads of her own design on the Home Shopping Network. And she wore what she sold. Her arms were weighed down with pounds of bracelets the size of "tricycles tires" and necklaces that went down to her knees. It's amazing she was able to stand up.

The Metropolitan show was titled "Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection." Rara Avis refers to "rare bird," and certainly her owlish eyeglasses were surely made all the better to see you with. She was Flaco the owl long before that ill-fated bird got out of his Central Park Zoo enclosure and flew around Manhattan for only a little more than a year.

I never saw Iris Apfel, and that's no surprise, because we surely traveled in vastly different circles. The only woman I ever saw that came close to being as eye catching was years ago when I saw an elderly woman by the Saks Fifth Avenue elevators on the main floor who was dressed mostly in black with a hat of some kind who had a bearing about her like Bette Davis. She was with some fashionably dressed younger woman who were not wearing all black. They no doubt were headed to a floor I wasn't going to.

Iris Apfel was indeed a rara avis.

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