By Paul McLeary
In the winter of 1996, a self-proclaimed “computer guy” working for a Japanese bank in lower Manhattan got the idea to start a magazine. As with any other self-funded and self-fueled endeavor, the ’zine would reflect the tastes and aesthetic of its creator — in this case, a guy who loved to write obituaries.
Called Goodbye!, the magazine was packed with a cast of characters who didn’t seem to have much in common other than the fact that they were all, well, dead. Among that first issue’s entries were Red Thunder Cloud, the last known speaker of the Catawba language; Ray McIntire, the inventor of Styrofoam (who never received a penny for his invention but likely some bad environmental karma); and Rolando and Carmelita Bolante, who were both electrocuted when they “came to the aid of their pig, which had a live wire stuck in its mouth.”
What tied all these people together? The abiding admiration — or fascination — of Steve Miller, the ’zine’s founder and main contributor, and the current obituaries editor for The New York Sun, a three-year-old Manhattan daily. “With Goodbye! I just did whoever floated my boat,” he says, “pretty much whoever I thought I could say something interesting or sardonic about, I would write.”
Since taking over the obit helm at the Sun, Miller has carved out a place for himself as one of the nation’s most talented — and iconoclastic — obituary writers. Part of the appeal is his eclectic subject choices, but he also brings to the form serious reporting and a singular, literary style. As Claire Martin, The Denver Post’s obit writer says, Miller has the “kind of dry humor and acute insights that elevate his profiles into nonfiction short stories.”
Miller, who grew up next to a graveyard in Montclair, New Jersey, admits to a lifetime fascination with cemeteries but didn’t begin to think about making death a way of life until after he graduated from Oberlin College in 1984. After completing a degree in religion he found himself back in New Jersey working as a night desk editor at the Hudson Dispatch, where one of his duties was taking obituaries from local funeral homes.
Fighting the boredom of long, lonely nights, Miller began making up his own obituaries and slipping them in the paper, “killing a couple of my friends for sport.” Writing joke obits for his buddies first planted the seed of the broader importance, both comedic and literary, of the obit as art form. “It was an immature thing to do,” he says now. “I later realized that it was far more interesting to remain absolutely committed to the facts, but to be creative with their selection and arrangement, and to write about them in a felicitous style.”
This first brush with journalism was short-lived, mainly because of frustration over not being able to write the kinds of stories he found interesting. But by January 1996, while he was working as a techie at a Wall Street bank, Miller felt the need to scratch a creative itch, and so Goodbye! was born.
Goodbye!’s demise, when it finally came about at the end of 2002, was brought about partly as a result of Miller’s own brush with death and the existential angst that followed. While working at that Wall Street bank, he escaped Tower 2 on the morning of September 11, 2001. When the smoke cleared a few months later his position had been eliminated — just as he and his wife, Rhonda, found out they had a baby on the way. Living off a severance package and conducting a frantic job search on Wall Street, Miller began to reassess his career choice, saying that 9/11 made him “think a little more seriously about wasting my life in finance, for a few bucks, if in consequence I not only delayed doing anything interesting, but got killed in the bargain.” He shut down Goodbye! and sent a note to the Sun, which at the time didn’t run obituaries, asking if he could write some on a freelance basis.
In January 2003, Miller was eating lunch in Brooklyn Heights with Rhonda when she began to go into labor, and as they were rushing home to pack a bag to go to the hospital he got a call from the Sun’s managing editor, asking him to come in and talk about writing obits. “You called at the worst possible moment,” Miller recalls saying. After their son, Wesley, was born, Miller interviewed and was offered the job. At the same time, though, he got another offer from Wall Street — for double the salary the Sun was offering. “I sat down with my wife,” he says, “and said, ‘Honey, I’d like to take a new job for half of what I used to make. How do you feel about that?’ And she said I should do what makes me happy. And so that’s what I did.”
Miller says that he tries to keep his obits wry, “but the difference between me and, say, The New York Times is that they feel like their duty is to the dead, or to record certain kinds of facts and present them soberly as a tribute, and I’m trying to keep the reader in mind — what’s interesting to the reader, what’s amusing to them, why do they want to read this?”
His subjects run the gamut. An obit he wrote this past June was of Mike Yurosek, who packaged the first batch of baby carrots in 1986, “Yurosek’s miniatures were the biggest thing to happen to carrots in the industry’s memory.”
Then there is David Tebet, the longtime director of talent relations at NBC, who also died in June. Miller described him as “the man in charge of stroking some of the largest egos in show business,” who was “blessed with a Runyonesque manner and glad-handing ways . . . Tebet, in trademark bug-eye glasses, dispensed favors and called in markers. He convinced William Holden to star in The Blue Knight, a 1973 miniseries, by getting the script rewritten to make the hero thinner.”
Seth Lipsky, the Sun’s editor, calls Miller “a master” of his craft. “I think he’s got a real reputation within the guild of obituary writers, and he’s just a remarkable guy. He’s got a very sophisticated appreciation for the political dimension of things.”
Each morning Miller combs through the Times’s death notices, as well as some twenty other sources. Over all, he says, the Sun “wants to stress local if possible; they don’t want people to be more than a couple of weeks dead, although that’s flexible; and in general they don’t want me to follow the Times — but that’s flexible in some cases.”
While Miller profiles a wide range of people, from the famous to the quietly influential (like his tribute to the Manhattan science teacher George Tokieda last March), he has an admitted soft spot for inventors, and he has a specific way of deciding which inventors to write up. “Any time I see someone credited with an invention,” he says, “I immediately go to the patent office and start figuring out if they actually invented what they’re said to have invented.”
A case in point was Andrew Toti, an inventor credited with over 500 patents, who died this past spring. Throughout his life, Toti claimed to have invented the Mae West life preserver, which was used by American pilots during World War II. In the end, Miller decided against writing his obit despite the fact that all the major dailies ran obits giving Toti credit for the Mae West, because after spending a couple of days calling the Naval Aviation History Museum, “where I had this guy pulling Mae Wests out of boxes,” Miller wasn’t satisfied that Toti had actually invented the thing.
Flash forward a couple of months, and The New York Times ran what Miller calls “the longest obit correction I’ve ever seen from them, saying he didn’t invent it.” Other news outlets ran similar corrections, and while Miller felt vindicated, “the crazy thing is that this guy deserved a great obit because of the things that you can verify.” The kicker to the whole story, and a fact that feeds into Miller’s obsession with the offbeat, is that Toti spent the last years of his life trying to invent a perpetual motion machine. “That’s the lead, man!” Miller exclaims. “An inventor spends his whole life inventing five hundred things and becomes extremely wealthy from them, yet essentially lies about this invention that he didn’t in fact make, and spends all this time chasing a phantom invention that doesn’t exist — perpetual motion. It’s a wonderful story.”
Miller says there are two prevailing schools of thought behind writing obits. One to which he subscribes, is simply to find the most interesting people possible. Hence his May obit of Maurice Catarcio, “Senior Citizen Strongman,” and another in January of Alf Evers, “Historian of the Catskills.” The other style, practiced by Jim Sheeler of the Rocky Mountain News, is to write obits for the ordinary and the downtrodden, which Miller describes as “these great obits that are just tearjerkers about ordinary people.” Across town from Sheeler, Claire Martin, at The Denver Post, practices the same style. “They have this bizarre sort of journalistic rivalry where they’re trying to scoop each other — it’s like this weird race to the bottom. Claire tries to save the world through journalism, whereas I’m just about the passing parade.
Perhaps, but Miller’s cockeyed take on that parade could inspire aspiring obit writers. A book he recently co-authored for journalism students called Life on the Death Beat (Marion Street Press) came out in August. Alana Baranick, an obit writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer (who was recently named best obit writer of 2005 by the American Society of Newspaper editors), was the lead author on the project, and Jim Sheeler also contributed.
“The life course is really important to what I do,” Miller says. “I’m always trying to present a Bildungsroman or make a sensible kind of unity of the person’s life. I really try to connect different parts of people’s lives, and I find that a lot of obits don’t try to do that, they just try to throw a list of facts out there. If I had to do that, I’d get into another business.”
Paul McLeary is a staff writer for CJR ’s daily journal of press criticism, CJRDaily.org.
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