Ms. Fox is a seasoned obituary writer, and I think right now is assigned to creating and updating the advance obits. These are the ones in the box, ready to be mixed with the news that someone of some notoriety has passed away. Think Betty Crocker, if you will.
Typically, when the deceased has passed the age of 90, a nonagenarian, the byline is Robert McFadden, the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who is considered the best rewrite man in the business. (I watch a lot of old movies.)
If you pay attention to these things, you almost invariable see McFadden's name, front page or not, whenever the deceased is over 90. Obviously, McFadden, who I understand is still active, had been assigned the task of creating advance obits. So, when the advance subject ages on the vine and eventually falls off at 90+, we have a McFadden byline. Simple as that.
Ms. Fox is the heir ascendant. She's been doing obits for a good number of years, and can be counted on to approach nearly every subject in a unique manner. Take yesterday's obit for Naomi Parker Fraley, 96, who it turns out was the real inspiration for the WW II Rosie the Riveter poster. Most obits start with the deceased's name, followed by a comma, then a lede that connects phrases and clauses like a cantilevered bridge, and pretty much tells you all you might really need to know about the deceased. Want more info? Read on. It will be interesting.
Ms. Fox's treatment of Naomi, whose death she doesn't get to until the third paragraph, is to start off with one man's research that went into establishing that Mrs. Fraley was the real inspiration for the poster, and that she has been uncredited for it for nearly 70 years, not through malice, but just through benign acceptance and path of least resistance, that someone else was the model, so to speak.
Once you get past the rather confusing caption that accompanied a photo of the poster in the print edition I got (Margalit, when queried admitted the caption was awkward, and was created by a production error and has since been revised.) you learn of all the twists and turns the authentication took. The obit has it all.
But think of the name Rosie for a second. It is such a friendly girl's name that anyone with it probably has a face full of freckles and a slingshot in her back pocket. She's fun to be with. A Doris Day.
In the 60s, when I ate at the 14th Street Automat there was a woman named Rosie who worked the steam table. She was a favorite of all the older guys. In the movie 'The African Queen,' who does Mr. Allnut take below deck and bonk? Rosie, of course. Who is the 'Queen of Corona' in Paul Simon's song? Rosie. And it's always Ring Around the Rosie, no?
And who "...wears rings on her fingers and bells on her toes...?" My sister Rose, of course. And Marty Robbins, singing his classic 'El Paso'...where does Falina whirl? Rose's Cantina.
For further proof of how the name Rose can be on someone's mind, think of the priest at the funeral services for my mother, whose names was Ruth, and who at one point was called Rose by the priest. Since he was waving incense at the casket when he did this I didn't want to interrupt and correct him. I let it go and just felt he was using the name as a verb. But our neighbor Rita did interrupt and quickly informed the good Father my mother's name was Ruth.
The obit is as much a tribute to Mrs. Fraley as it is to the Seton Hall professor, James J. Kimble (great name for someone who is trying to get something right) who spent six years tracing whose image was really the one that launched a slogan and a bicep.
Who is the real Rosie the Riveter has not been the all-consuming mystery that say, who is Carly Simon singing about in 'You're So Vain,' or the one-time mystery of who is 'Deep Throat'? Not that we're not left with unanswered questions. Like, "is there life on other planets?" And the real big one..."is there really a Section 51?" And perhaps the even bigger one of "what was on the 18½ minutes of deleted Watergate tapes."
It seems for decades a Michigan woman, Geraldine Hoff Doyle innocently thought she was the one who was depicted by the poster. When Geraldine passed away in 2010, the NYT obituary, and others, gave her credit as being the inspiration for the Rosie the Riveter poster. Until Mr. Kimble's research, Geraldine was the generally accepted person who inspired the poster.
Ms. Doyle genuinely believed she was the inspiration. She never received any money for it, and never signed autographs next to Pete Rose at baseball card conventions, but think of the people who have tried to pass themselves off as the genuine article.
There was the story of Anastasia, the daughter of Czar Nicholas II, who supposedly survived the firing squad and who tried to convince the Swiss bankers that she was the rightful heir to whatever the Czar had secreted away in the Swiss banking system. Over the years several women came forward trying to pry the fortune from the numbered account. None were considered to be the real Anastasia.
They made a pretty good movie about that with Yul Brenner, Ingrid Bergman and Helen Hayes years ago. Like Bitcoins with no identifiable owner, who gets the Czar's fortune now that no one can rightfully claim it? Putin, again?
Then there was the famous Life magazine photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt of the sailor dipping and kissing a startled nurse in Times Square when the news of Japan's surrender hit the billboard news scroll.
Since the photo does not show the nurse's face, there were always a few women who put themselves in the frame as the lips that were kissed by the U.S. Navy. Eventually, I think someone was authenticated as the nurse in the photo.
And then was have James J. Kimble, associate professor of communication at Seton Hall who set out years ago to try and authenticate the source of the Rosie poster. After taking six years of on-and-off effort, Mr Kimble, like the fictional Richard Kimble who finally catches up to the one-armed man who killed his wife, finds that the photo below of a wartime defense plant female worker at an industrial lathe was Naomi Parker Fraley.
The 1942 photo is of course black and white, but the unmistakable bandana is atop her head. Women of that era working in the defense plants had to keep their hair tied back, or up, so as not to get caught in the machinery. I remember one newsreel story that told the tale of the 1940s movie actress Veronica Lake being asked to choose a different hairstyle that if imitated by the women would not put their locks in danger of pulling the worker's head into the machine.
Can an obituary have a happy ending? Well, consider that Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who passed away in 2010 went to the grave thinking she really was Rosie the Riveter in J. Howard Miller's poster, a poster designed for Westinghouse as a shop safety poster, but one that found a higher calling.
And think of Naomi Parker Fraley, pictured below, underneath the Rosie poster. She is seen posing in 2016!, when it was acknowledged she was the Rosie in the poster, looking waaay beyond the "remains of a fine looking woman about her."
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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