I have also had — it is much-needed leavening — the delicious, often downright campy pleasure of telling the stories of people who cast the form of midcentury material culture. Among my favorites is the wonderfully named Massachusetts sculptor Don Featherstone, who, be he saint or sinner, shaped the postwar suburban landscape by inventing the lawn flamingo.
As I wrote: “Mr. Featherstone had not contemplated creating an enduring emblem of kitsch in 1957, when his first flamingo sailed off the assembly line, or the next year, when the bird was brought to market. A recent art-school graduate, he was simply heeding career advice that would become a sardonic watchword for young people: ‘Plastics.’”
Also in this deeply pleasurable vein were obits for the inventors of the Frisbee, the Pet Rock, Etch A Sketch (which was given the most wonderful headline design ever to grace a news obituary), Stove Top stuffing and the crash-test dummy. One of my favorite assignments ever was the obit of Leslie Buck, who invented the Anthora, the blue-and-white Greek-themed cardboard cup from which generations of Gothamites drank their coffee — and without which a bevy of New York cop shows would not look remotely the same.
The single greatest reward of writing obits, I have learned, is the chance to touch history. This was brought forcibly home to me in 2013, when I reported the obituary of a man named Tom Christian. Mr. Christian was the longtime chief radio operator on Pitcairn Island, responsible for keeping that speck of rock in the Pacific in contact with the world. As might be expected for someone from that place with that name, he was a direct descendant — the great-great-great-grandson — of the Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian.
In reporting news obits, it is our policy to speak, whenever possible, with our subjects’ families. On The Times’s nickel, I dialed Pitcairn, nearly 6,000 miles from New York. I got a connection clear as crystal, and reached Mr. Christian’s daughter, who gave me (in a lilting accent that to my uneducated ears sounded pure New Zealand) the biographical details I sought.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/insider/obituary-writer-margalit-fox-retires.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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