There's a Fox in the House

One of the joys of reading obituaries is that even when a writer leaves the staff of the NYT, you can count on one of their obits popping up when one of their subjects passes away who they wrote an advance obit for. It's almost like the ballplayers coming out of the rows of corn in Field of Dreams. The writer gets exposure, even if they've died.

Professional obituary writers refer to the phenomena of an obit writer passing away before their subject as a "double down" when the advance obit finally bobs up in the water. This happened most famously when the advance obit for heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey was written by Red Smith, and Red passed away before Jack. The editors always make a small note of this.

Mel Gussow's obit for Elizabeth Taylor appeared after Mel's death. Liz outlived a lot of predictions that she was on her last set of costume jewelry and husbands.

Generally, when these advance obits hit the pages and the writer has left, for whatever reason, you will see that the deceased is quite old, usually over 90, oftentimes over 100. Robert D. McFadden's byline appears over lots of these obits, even though he's probably retired. He was a Pulitzer Prize winning rewrite man, probably the best ever in the business in the business, and writes the best ledes. I think he night still show up at a desk at the paper even although he's 85.

Part of the duties of being an obituary writer are writing for the freshly passed away for whom there may not be an advance obit on file, and updating the advance obits in the morgue for those subjects still not going gently in to the night.

My guess is the late, great Robert McG. Thomas Jr may not have been on the obit desk very long. I like to think he pissed off some straitlaced editors and was assigned obit duty as a journalist's entry into purgatory.

If so, the editors did him and all of us a favor, since all he ever did was turn out gems on the departed. He passed away at 60 in 2000. I don't think I can recall any obit of his that appeared after he passed away. He probably didn't get assigned to do too many advances. Maybe none.

An obit bylined by Margalit Fox appeared in the NYT the other day for Eleanor Jackson Piel, Steely Lawyer for the Marginalized, who passed away at 102. Ms. Fox is still with us, just no longer with the NYT. I know she wrote about the story of Conan Doyle, the author of all those Sherlock Holmes books and stories becoming a detective himself, Conan Doyle for the Defense: The Story of  Sensational British Murder, A Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer.

Obviously she left the NYT to write books, because last year she turned out another called, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History. 

The life of Eleanor Jackson Piel is as interesting as her cases. She in effect becomes My Cousin Vinny in a case that springs a man on Florida's Death Row 16 hours before his execution. He had been framed by the police in Dade City Florida in 1979 for the murder of a woman. He and his brother were guilty in the eyes of the police because one was a biker, the other a roofer, and they were involved in growing and selling marijuana. I guess you could attribute that to the '70s.

Another of her famous cases was taking on the NYC Board of Education over its late 1960s refusal to admitting a teenage math prodigy, Alice de Rivera into Stuyvesant High School, then considered an "elite" all-male high school that also required the passing of an entrance exam. (It is still considered an "elite" school, despite numerous school chancellors trying to water down its admission selection process.)

Stuyvesant High School has been around since 1904. My father went there and graduated in 1932; I graduated in 1966. Although in the era I entered the school you had to pass an entrance exam, I don't think my father had to pass one to be admitted, despite its specialized curriculum.

The school was always a blend of science, math, and vocational shops. I learned wood working and ceramics there, with wood working still something I engage in. Vocational curriculums were big in the city then, almost the training ground for union jobs. NYC was once a manufacturing, blue collar hub.

The newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, a child of the New York City's education, would joke that any kid with a German surname, like Fittig, Schroeder or Schneider, was put in front of a wood lathe to learn making table legs and carpentry.

Almost coincidently, Eleanor married a Gerard Piel, "the publisher of Scientific America magazine and a scion of the family that brewed Piels beer."

There are a few things I remember about Piels beer. The commercials done by the radio comedy team Bob and Ray, pretending to be Bert and Harry Piel; Piels was a lousy tasting, low-budget beer, and was once hawked by Jimmy Breslin in a television ad when he was at the height of his newspaper column popularity. Jimmy was also once an evening newscaster who supposedly knew everything there was to know about the machinations of New York City politics, unions, and the police. I sincerely doubted he really drank Piels.

Eleanor won an out-of-court settlement for Alice de Rivera, but she never entered the school. Her family moved away. After the 1969 ruling, 12 girls were admitted to Stuyvesant, and of course have continued to be admitted with no restrictions, other than acceptance by taking the entrance exam.

Alice married and is now a physician in Maine, Alice Haines. Stuyvesant awarded her a Stuyvesant diploma in 2013.

Eleanor's obit gets the full-monty—six columns, two photos, and lots of column inches. The emergence of the advance obit by Margalit tells me that the advance obits in the can by McFadden night finally be nearing their own end.

We can therefore look forward to more nonagenarians and centenarians passing away under the byline of Ms. Fox.

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