Seven Extraordinary People
May 3, 2020
Lives Well Lived
Recent obituaries in the news
This morning, we pause from checking the daily death toll and focus on seven lives that were lived in full. Reading these stories makes us imagine a world where newspapers had the manpower and space to give each person his or her due. This small collection is a chance for us to remember the many people who touched our lives.
Horace was the vivacious one; Vi kept him grounded ([link removed])
By PAUL DUGGAN, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
Horace Saunders, a Briton by birth and a tailor in the District for decades, was an engaging storyteller whose family didn’t mind his occasional flights of whimsy. How he met young Violet Gubbay more than 75 years ago, for instance: No one can entirely vouch for the tale of fated love he used to share, with a twinkle in his eye. But it was a marvelous story all the same. “Very Horace,” his granddaughter Natalie Greenberg said. This was in India during World War II, when Saunders (true fact) was a British soldier fighting the Japanese in Burma, now known as Myanmar.
** Madeline Kripke, Doyenne of Dictionaries ([link removed])
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By SAM ROBERTS, The New York Times (Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
Madeline Kripke, who kept one of the world’s largest private collection of dictionaries, much of it crammed into her Greenwich Village apartment, could be defined this way: liberal [adj., as in giving unstintingly], compleat [adj., meaning having all the requisite skills] and sui generis [adj., in a class by itself].
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** Steve Dalkowski, Model for Erratic Pitcher in ‘Bull Durham’ ([link removed])
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By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN, The New York Times (Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
Steve Dalkowski, a left-handed pitcher with an unimposing physique, spent nine seasons in the minor leagues without getting into a major league game. But just about everyone in the baseball world of the 1950s and early ’60s seemed to have heard stories of his extraordinary gift. Since radar guns had yet to arrive on the baseball scene, nobody could measure Dalkowski’s fastball under game conditions with precision. But it became gospel that he could throw well in excess of 100 miles an hour.
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** Willie Levi, 73, Dies; He Escaped a Life of Servitude ([link removed])
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By DAN BARRY, The New York Times (Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
If Willie Levi had enjoyed choice in life, he would have gone back to Texas — back to the small city of Orange, where he had played the spoons, sung the blues and lived in a shotgun house crowded with cousins. But Mr. Levi never had much choice. He was sent first to an institution and then to Iowa, where he and other men with intellectual disabilities worked in virtual servitude at a turkey-processing plant for decades. He never made it back to Orange.
** Arloine Morris, a hunter, angler and quilter ([link removed])
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By GREG STANLEY, The [Minneapolis] Star Tribune
There’s a photo of Arloine “Toots” Morris, grandmother of 11, great-grandmother of 17, decked out in her blaze orange hunting gear near the start of deer season on the back of a small ATV with her husband of 70 years. Morris loved the outdoors and surrounded herself with family.... She also loved to quilt. She made large quilts, small quilts, baby quilts. She made a quilt after each one of her five kids was born, and then for each of their kids, and each of their kids’ kids. “She would get any scrap material and make them for us,” said Jody Scott, her daughter. “I figure she has over 100 quilts here now.”
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** Nick Kotz, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist ([link removed])
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By MATT SCHUDEL, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
Nick Kotz, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for exposing unsafe and unsanitary conditions in the nation’s meatpacking plants and who later became a Washington Post reporter and the author of books investigating hunger, civil rights and military contracting, died April 26 at his home near Broad Run, Va. He was 87.
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** Philip Kahn, 100, Dies; Spanish Flu Took His Twin a Century Ago ([link removed])
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By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, The New York Times (Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
Philip Kahn believed that history repeats itself, a truism that has hit home for his family in extraordinary fashion. His twin brother, Samuel, died as an infant during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. Now Mr. Kahn himself has died of the coronavirus. He was 100. “He was a very healthy 100,” Warren Zysman, one of his grandsons, said in a phone interview. “He watched the news, he was completely aware of the pandemic. When he started coughing, he knew he might have it, and he knew the irony of what was going on.”
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