CURRENTS
Obits: The Final Deadline Club
Attention, former UPI newshounds: your old employer's got one last assignment for you — your own obituary. Three to four hundred words, double-spaced. Don't expect a byline.
The once-mighty wire service, which narrowly avoided penning its own obit over the years, lost droves of employee records during one of its many bankruptcies and now finds itself scrambling for copy whenever a former reporter or editor dies.
"We would like to be able to give a decent obituary on any current or former employee, but sometimes information is hard to come by. So why not write your own?" UPI's national editor, Harold "Skip" Martin, wrote in an August message to former Unipressers. UPI set up a special e-mail address and offered a few guidelines: be honest, be brief, and be sure to include the phone number of your next of kin. All obits will be subject to some degree of editing.
"Yeah it's a little bit macabre," Martin acknowledged. "But the strongest bond in UPI has always been its people, and they deserve to be remembered."
Al Webb, a twenty-eight-year UPI veteran, thinks the company's idea is a good one. "Why let some other hack muck up your own life and death when you should be more than capable of doing it yourself?" the sixty-seven-year-old said. "And it stops all that speculation about how I managed four marriages and three divorces, the names of my twenty-five cats, and the real reason I missed fifteen airplanes getting from Saigon to Da Nang."
For fifty-nine-year-old Lonnie Falk, the request to write his own death notice sent him spinning back to August of 1969 when he was covering Hurricane Camille and was thought to have gone down in a Coast Guard chopper crash. After a few hours his bureau assumed the worst, and Falk called in just in time to keep his obit off the wire.
"I always sort of regretted" calling in, Falk mused. "It would have been nice to have seen the great things they undoubtedly would have said about me."
Ron Cohen, a former UPI managing editor who covered the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and co-wrote the 1990 book, Down to the Wire: UPI's Fight for Survival, said he was "highly amused" but not surprised by Martin's request.
"UPI has a glorious if somewhat checkered history and virtually no current staff — certainly none capable of putting together obituaries on the company's legendary figures," he said. "And it is very typical of UPI to try to get something for nothing."
So far, Martin says the response to his request has been light, but he's keeping the project open indefinitely.
Don Mullen, a UPI veteran whose career spanned coverage of the 1950s Beat Generation through the September 11 World Trade Center attacks, said his own reluctance to put pen to paper stems from the conviction that at seventy-one he's still got a few more good years left, and for another reason that hits closer to home.
"It's hard to write your own obit because you know the who and the what in the lead graph, and you keep wondering about the when, the where, and the why," he said.
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