I’ve been reading and appreciating newspaper obituaries for years – learning interesting facts about little-known people, acquiring little-known facts about interesting people, and coming across plenty of variations on those themes in the process.
Most U.S. newspapers have two flavors of these written summaries of a person’s life:
- the paid “death notice,” generally placed by a funeral home or a family to ensure knowledge of a person’s passing, and available to anyone willing to pay the fee; and
- the editorial “obituary,” generally written by a newsroom staffer after someone has determined that the readership needs to know both of a person’s passing and of the life that person lived, and in practice limited in number by the amount of time and space available to the city desk.
Death notices often are the largest category of classified advertising in the paper after jobs, cars, and homes. Like most kinds of classified content, they have begun to change because of the Web. Obituaries often are the most frequently searched items on newspaper Web sites if you combine all the search strings people use to try to find them. Like most kinds of news content, they also have begun to change because of the Web.
Really, the only virtual trip down St. Clair Street came when my friends showered me with gifts and remembrances. Here, for example, you see my very own Chicago Tribune Chicagoland Music Festival first-place medal, struck by C.D. Peacock. (The Festival, held every year from 1930 to 1966, was just one of the many events – the Golden Gloves, the Silver Skates, the College All-Star Football Game – that the Tribune gave to Chicago over the years. Jack fondly recalled the glow that suffused Soldier Field when, at the end of each Festival, the lights were turned down and everyone in attendance struck a match and held it aloft.)
