As a journalist it always fascinates me where my colleagues find their passions. For me it’s how people connect with their houses, for Tom Hawthorn it’s their deaths. And, while some of the people featured in Deadlines: obits of memorable British Columbians are well known, most often it’s the ordinary life that’s the quirkiest and most colourful.
In Deadlines, Tom, a veteran newspaper reporter and obituary writer (there really is a Society of Professional Obituary Writers) features 38 people who died between 1988 and 2011 divided into sections that run the gamut from “eccentrics” and “trailblazers” to “warriors” and “innovators.”
The stories are beautifully crafted and highly entertaining. Most appeared in the Globe and Mail between 1988 and 2011, and they share two traits–the subjects have some kind of connection to British Columbia, and they’re all dead.
“An obituary is a profile in which the subject cannot grant an interview, so we obituarists behave as newsroom jackals, rending bits of reportage and quotation from reporters who have come before,” he writes. “Perhaps it is for this reason the obituary desk is considered the lowest spot in the newsroom hierarchy. It is a job most typically assigned to cub reporters and burned-out veterans, recovering alcoholics and those who still seek inspiration in the bottom of a bottle.”
If that’s true, then Tom has elevated the profession–and those of us who write history are reaching for our next drink.
I first learned about Spoony Singh (Sundher) from a mention in the Victoria Heritage Foundation’s This Old House series. Tom read about him in a paid obituary notice in the classified section of his newspaper. Before founding the Hollywood Wax Museum in 1965 and a string of other businesses, Spoony, who leads the book, was wonderfully eccentric. He went to school in Victoria, worked in a variety of businesses, married there, and once rode an elephant down Hollywood Boulevard. There is Harvey Lowe from “Entertainers,” who was born in Victoria in 1918, and by age 13 was touring Europe as the world yo-yo champion wearing a white tie and tails. He met Amelia Earhart, the Prince of Wales and Julie Christie along the way.
Born in 1914, Margaret Fane Rutledge founded the Flying Seven, a legendary group of pioneer women from Vancouver, who as Tom writes: “showed a woman’s place was in the cockpit.” Under “athletes” there is Jimmy [baby face] McLarnin, born in Strathcona in 1907, and who twice won the world welterweight championship. Those are a few of my favourites, no doubt you’ll have your own.
You can read the stories chronologically, but I read the book as Tom suggested, as short stories from a newspaper, read in front of the fire and just before bed, chosen at random.
I wish I thought up the title–credit goes to Kit Krieger. Tom says the ‘also rans’ were “Last Writes” and “B.C. R.I.P.”—almost as clever, but deadlines really nailed it.
Deadlines: obits of memorable British Columbians, by Tom Hawthorn.
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