I Often Wonder

I often wonder, why am I suddenly thinking about something? What triggered my thoughts to seek out a Robert McFadden obituary for Amory Bradford, the NYT chief labor negotiator with the striking Typographical Union No. 6, headed by Bertram Powers, during the famous strike of 1962-1963?

The 114-day strike was monumental. Until then, most people really did get their news from newspapers. There were 8 newspapers published daily in New York City at the time. During the strike, TV news expanded (some might say exploded), and what had been the 11 o'clock news that lasted for 15 minutes, became the 11 o'clock news that went for 30 minutes. More expansion followed. The TV media genie was released from the bottle, and was never put back.  

I can full well tell you what triggered those thoughts.

In what we call our computer room/my "office" I have my father's desk from when he and my mother lived in Philadelphia after the war. They had both been freshly discharged from the Army and my father was working aa a design engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. 

My father told me the desk came from Wanamaker's Department store and cost what was then a staggering sum of $75. It's a cherry wood, knee hole desk that has been in my family every since. It is now one of the two desks I have in the computer room. It's been in this room now for over 30 years so it's not something I don't see or use everyday.

For some reason as I was reaching over the desk to turn the air conditioning on when I thought of the roll top desk we had in the back of the flower shop. Well, it started out as a roll top desk, but my father told me his older brother, at some point when the desk was in the flower shop's prior location across 18th Street, removed the roll top and left the flat surface and drawers. It was a "truncated" roll top desk for evermore and where I did all my homework through high school in the '60s.

My father was the third of four boys. He was born in 1915 and his older brother Angelo was probably born in 1907, or 1908. My father never liked Angelo and I suspect the little I knew of Angelo when I was growing up, I can imagine he was a bully to the three younger brothers.

Angelo probably dropped out of high school to work and help support the family, and was likely jealous of the second brother George who went to the Naval Academy and my father, who went to Steven's Tech in Hoboken, then Syracuse University to study engineering.

I only ever knew Uncle Andy as a bartender at the Vanderbilt Hotel's Crypt Bar Room. The few times I saw him there he was wearing the full regalia hotel bartender vest with epaulets that made him look like a Mexican general.

The Crypt Room is a gorgeous, mosaic, low-tiled, ceiled room that is still there, as is the rest of the building that was converted to co-op or condo apartments. I think the address is 4 Park Avenue, just south of 34th Street on the west side of the avenue.

Mother's Day is one of the busiest days in a florist's life. We were busy. Very busy. But handling it. My Uncle Andy had little to do with the flower shop, but lived nearby at 36th Street off 3rd Avenue. 

One Mother's day he decided to pay us an unexpected visit and wanted "to help." Doing what I don't know, because he had no idea what to do with flowers. I don't think he wanted to deliver them. My father glowered.

Thinking back at the moment, as I have many times and just did again, I would describe the shop's temperature as having dropped 15° when my father greeted his older brother with, "No, we're doing just fine." Something like that.

Maybe it's because I just read William McDonald's tribute to Robert D. McFadden on retiring after 63 years at the New York Times at 87, after winning a Pulitzer for Rewriting and having countless obituaries published, while 250 of his advance obituaries await being sprung from the obit morgue to eventually float to an edition's page when the subject passes away. They all eventually pass away.

Where/how did I come up with the thought of a drop in room temperature when someone odious enters a room? A McFadden obit, specifically the one he wrote about Amory Bradford when Amory passed away at 85 in 1998. It did a posting on it in 2009, the first year of this blog.

In 2009 there a presentation at the New York Public library with Daniel Okrent, Marilyn Johnson and Ann Wroe on the stage discussing obituaries. The large room was packed, standing room only.

Marilyn Johnson had just written a book about newspaper obituaries: The Dead Beat: Lost Souls Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. Ann Wroe wrote obituaries for The Economist magazine, one appearing with each weekly issue, and gained considerable notoriety when she wrote one about an African Grey parrot Alex.

Daniel Okrent mentioned he was the first New York Times ombudsman, a position he likened, probably quite accurately, as "the complaint department."

Mr. Okrent fished out some examples of NYT obituaries. One was written by Robert D. McFadden on the demise of Amory Bradford in 1998, a New York Times vice president and chief labor negotiator for the Publishers Association with the striking Typographical Workers' Union No. 6 during the 1962-1963 labor strike that became a 114-day strike, and a watershed moment in the history of newspapers and media in general.

To say Mr. Bradford was of a patrician nature and imperious bearing, would only just start the adjectives needed to describe him. In McFadden's September 6, 1998 obit on Amory Bradford, Mr. McFadden quotes the chief labor writer for the Times, A.H. Raskin, who wrote about the negotiations after the strike ended, as saying, "one top-level mediator said of Mr. Bradford that 'he brought an attitude of such icy disdain into the conference rooms that the mediator often felt he ought to ask the hotel to send up more heat.'"    

An obituary is not just about the person who has passed away; it's about the language used to describe the person who has passed away.

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