The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries

by Marilyn Johnson
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006)
Hardcover, 244 Pages, Hardcover

This publication, proudly set forth under the title of: The Dead Beat will gratify the reader with a survey both humorous and poignant of the wonders enfolded in the pages of an ordinary newspaper, and including many marvelous tales relating to Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. As witnessed and faithfully recorded by Marilyn Johnson.

From the Cover: The New York Times comes each morning and never fails to deliver news of the important dead. Every day is new; every day is fraught with significance. I arrange my cup of tea, prop up my slippers. Obituaries are history as it is happening. Whose time am I living in? Was he a success or a failure, lucky or doomed, older than I am or younger? Did she know how to live? I shake out the pages. Tell me the secret of a good life! Where else can you celebrate the life of the pharmacist who moonlighted as a spy, the genius behind Sea Monkeys, the school lunch lady who spent her evenings as a ballroom hostess? No wonder so many readers skip the news and the sports and go directly to the obituary page. The Dead Beat is the story of how these stories get told. Enthralled by the fascinating lives that were marching out of this world, Marilyn Johnson tumbled into the obits pages to find out what made it so lively. She sought out the best obits in the English language and chased the people who spent their lives writing about the dead. Surveying the darkest corners of Internet chat rooms, surviving a mass gathering of obituarists, making a pilgrimage to London to savor the most caustic and literate obits of all, Marilyn Johnson leads us into the cult and culture behind the obituary page. The result is a rare combination of scrapbook and compelling read, a trip through recent history and the unusual lives we don’t quite appreciate until they’re gone.
My Review: As some of you may or may not know, I work for MyFamily.com and Ancestry.com (they’re both owned by the same company). Occasionally, as part of my job responsibilities, I go through and do obituaries, which means I pull information from online obituaries and put the vital information into a program that the company then will post online. That being said, after my review of The Dead Beat here, I have included some of the more interesting information that I have found in obituaries lately. As tedious as the job can be, and it is one of the least-liked assignments we get at work, but every once in a while, you find a good’un, and it just makes your day. I first saw this book in Borders, and knew instantly that I had to read it, and not just because I worked with obits at work. I knew I had to read it because I have recently discovered this new style of nonfiction, such as demonstrated in Stiff, Spook, Poison and now The Dead Beat. I enjoyed every moment I spent in this book. Whether it was watching Johnson musing on what the collective noun of a group of obituarists would be. (A wake of obituarists? A plague of obituarists?) Or, Johnson’s musing on who would write the obituary of the obituarists if the hotel where the Great Obituary Writers’ International Conference (GOWIC) was taking place should collapse. (With a touch of the macabre, the GOWIC holds in conferences in such places as a New Mexican ghost town, a “haunted” and atmospheric castle in England, etc., and the whole thing was organized on a dare to begin with!) Discussing the various styles of obituaries that exist: the biting and sarcastic obits of the London papers; the egalitarian and “every man” obits of the United States; the simplistic and emotionally charged “tributes” that appeared in papers post-9/11, or the simple and often funny obits that appear online at alt.obituaries, Johnson launches into a raucous and often poignant cross-section of the modern landscape of our tributes to the dead, and makes us laugh as we follow along in her wake (no pun intended). I cannot say enough good things about this book, and can only recommend that if it sounds like your cup of tea, then by all means head out right now and pick it up, you will not be disappointed. It is a well-written and thoroughly engaging and engrossing look at the titular “perverse pleasures of obituaries.”

Interesting Obituaries I Have Read:
--He served his country proudly in the U.S. Navy during WWII. John survived his tour in Europe and was at D-Day. He took the Marines in to shore on LST’s “to shoot some g-dd@mn Nazis.” John loved baseball especially the Yankees, and one of the thrills as a young man was when he met Babe Ruth.
--Morrissy passed the State Bar exams in June of 1942 and became the first woman lawyer in Walworth County. She was also one of the first 150 women lawyers in the state.
--Charles Chibitty, 83, the last survivor of the Comanche Code Talkers who used their native language to transmit messages for the Allies in Europe during World War II, died Wednesday (July 20, 2005) at a Tulsa, Oklahoma, nursing home. A group of Comanche Indians from the Lawton, Oklahoma, area was selected for special duty in the U.S. Army to provide the Allies with a language that the Germans could not understand. Like the larger group of Navajo Indians who performed a similar service in the Pacific theater, the Comanches were dubbed “Code Talkers.” Mr. Chibitty was born November 20, 1921, near Medicine Park, Oklahoma, and attended high school at Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kansas. He enlisted in 1941. “It’s strange, but growing up as a child I was forbidden to speak my native language at school,” Mr. Chibitty said in 2002. “Later my country asked me to. My language helped win the war, and that makes me very proud. Very proud.” In 1999, Mr. Chibitty received the Knowlton Award, which recognizes individuals for outstanding intelligence work, in a ceremony at the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes.
--Houston-based Space Services Inc., which specializes in space memorials, plans to send a few grams of Doohan’s ashes aboard a rocket later this year. Remains are sealed in an aluminum capsule that stays in orbit up to several hundred years before falling and vaporizing in the Earth’s atmosphere, the company has said. It should be a fitting finale for an actor who, as the Starship Enterprise’s frazzled chief engineer saved the Enterprise almost every week from blowing up, burning up or being overrun by renegade aliens when the warp drive, the phasers, the shields, the power cells or some other futuristic collection of doohickeys failed. As the man who commanded the Enterprise’s particle beam transporter, Doohan’s character also inspired the phrase, “Beam me up, Scotty.” Captain Kirk and other members of the Enterprise crew never really issued the order quite that way, however, until the fourth Star Trek film when Kirk said, “Scotty, beam me up.”
--He was the chief surgeon at a major Minnesota metropolitan hospital, and who performed and officiated over more than 250,000 surgeries, who taught surgery to students at the University, and who served on the board of directors of the Minnesota Board of Surgery, died Wednesday due to complications of open-heart surgery.”
--A former housecleaner who had been arrested in the slayings of a pastor and his daughter, whose bludgeoned and bound bodies were discovered after a fire in their suburban home, has died in prison, police officials said on Thursday.
--He flew a P-47 Thunderbolt during WWII, and was shot down over Yugoslavia during a mission. He was severely burned and captured by German soldiers and held captive in a POW camp for nine months before he managed to escape into the wilds of the Black Forest. He then made his way through Germany and Occupied France where – with the help of the French Underground – made his way to Spain and eventually to England where he rejoined the Allied Forces in time for the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day.
--John Zgeb wrestled under the name “Johnny Zorro” in the mid-1950s.
--Carrie Wade (Atteberry) Cool - Born February 14, 1911, at McCool, Mississppi.
--During World War II, he served in the Philippine Commonwealth Army, U.S. Armed Forces, Far East. From October 1942 to August 1945, he was a member of the Filipino-American Irregular troops (guerilla unit) and was survivor of the Bataan Death March. He retired in 1945 as a sergeant in the U.S. Armed Forces, Far East.
--Ben Michael “Mike” Carter was a Renaissance man who loved writing. He authored five books, was a columnist for the Irving Morning News and other publications and wrote many newspaper letters to the editor.
--Mr. Triplett’s favorite quote was, “The mark of a good teacher is when your students no longer need you.”
--He was a member of the Moose and Nativity Lutheran Church of Weeki Wachee.
--She was a supervisor for Mom and Pop’s Pop Corp., a soda supply company.
--He was a native of New York City, where he worked in retail sales for over 40 years at Macy’s department store, and participated in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade for each of those 40 years, driving floats and handling balloons.
--Services are entrusted to The Golden Rule Funeral Home
--Frank “Chick” Horrell, 81, of North Versailles, died Tuesday, July 19, 2005. Frank was a member of the National Serbian Federation and the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.
--He was Chief Engineer of WCOM in Parkersburg and WMOV in Ravenswood and made several major technological advances within the radio broadcast field to include the first remote broadcasts of local sports from the stadiums or from vehicles for on the spot news updates.
--Years after the Vietnam War, retired Gen. William Westmoreland remained steadfast, proud of his command and of his support for a bigger military at a time when American casualties were mounting. “I have no apologies, no regrets. I gave my very best efforts,” Westmoreland told The Associated Press in 1985. “I’ve been hung in effigy. I’ve been spat upon. You just have to let those things bounce off.” Westmoreland died Monday of natural causes at Bishop Gadsden retirement home, where he had lived with his wife, said his son, James Ripley Westmoreland. He was 91. … Westmoreland saw action in North Africa, Sicily and Europe during World War II. He attained the rank of colonel by the age of 30. As commander of the 34th Field Artillery Battalion fighting German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, he earned the loyalty and respect of his troops for joining in the thick of battle rather than remaining behind the lines at a command post.
--He was a 1962 graduate of Gibbs High School and a 1967 graduate of the Tuskeegee Institute. For 25 years he served in the Army and retired from the EDS Corp. He enjoyed barbecuing and baking sweet potato pies.
--He was born in New York and came to Florida in 1949. He was an Army Air Force veteran of World War II and retired from the U.S. Postal Service. He lobbied on behalf of the National Association of Letter Carriers and was a founding board member of the Miami Postal Credit Union.
--Geraldine Fitzgerald, a feisty, gravel-voiced Dublin redhead who drew instant acclaim in her first Hollywood films, including a 1939 Oscar nomination for Wuthering Heights, before carving out a long, varied career in films, television, cabaret and theater, died Sunday afternoon at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 91.
--Dr. Clarence Dennis, who performed the first open-heart surgery that included the use of a heart-lung machine, which he helped develop, died July 11. He was 96.
--She was a member of St. Charles Catholic Church Ukulele Band for 17 years.
--Our toast to you David, is your favorite phrase, “Up Yours!”
--Upon running into his future wife, William “Tim” Kelley wasn’t shot in the heart by Cupid’s arrow. Instead, he was punched in the face by someone’s fist. He had gone to a community festival in Scottdale to meet some friends, his future wife included in that group, when he was jumped. His attacker busted his lip, so Christine Santmyer pulled a bandanna out of her pocket and gave it to him. … After the fight at the festival, Santmyer and another friend ran off in search of the offender. She didn’t find him that day, but she did find love. The two were eventually married, staying together for 22 years up until his death last week.
--In the 40’s, he was part of an international team (New Zealand, Russia, Germany, U.K.) that designed and constructed the first nuclear reactor (code name ZEEP) to go critical outside the U.S. This was the beginning of the Chalk River project and Canada’s nuclear program. In the 50’s he managed the design and engineering of the supersonic high speed wind tunnel that was used in the Avro Arrow project. In 1958, he joined Canadian General Electric in Peterborough, eventually becoming one of the pioneers in its Civilian Atomic Power Department. He was responsible for the site selection (Point Tupper), construction and operation of Canada’s first successful heavy water plant.
--She was a dealer in horse heads.

--He was a member of Friendless Chapel Baptist Church of Sneedville.