Obituaries

When I worked in the library of the Washington Post in the early sixties, long before computers, I occasionally came upon a fat envelope in the files with some famous living person's name on it. Inside these envelopes were beautifully crafted obituaries, waiting to be pulled out and run in the paper as soon as the famous people died. The big papers still keep pre-written obits on file, I'm sure, but nowadays they're all digital. Sometimes I wonder whether the famous ever consider the fact that their obits have already been written. Kim Kardashian's obituary is sitting in the files of the Washington Post, I bet. How does she like that?

Here in Lambertville, Richard, the funeral director, writes the obituaries for his clients. We chatted with him about that the other day. One of the local guys had just died, a man everyone in town knew by sight. The obituary that appeared in the paper was mildly flattering. No mention, for instance, of the time he robbed the poor box at St. John the Evangelist. Harold wanted to know whether the wife of the deceased wrote it, and Richard said no, he did. "I write 'em all," he said. When he first came to town, old ladies would accost him on the street and say, "You got it wrong about Myrtle." He can only put down what the relatives tell him to, after all. With the passage of time he came to bury most of the old ladies, and now there is no one left to complain.

I read the obituary page of the Trenton Times every morning. You get to a stage in your life where you have a legitimate expectation of finding people you know. This morning I was brought up short by an obit (not of someone I knew, nor did Richard write it) of a Mercer County man whose proudest, and maybe only, achievement in life was that he bowled three perfect games.

Makes you think. What do we want to be remembered for? My sister, when she was dying, rather cruelly insisted that I write her obituary, listing all of her professional achievements as a fine artist, which were considerable, so that she could check it over before she checked out. To my horror I found after she was gone that the newspapers want money to run obituaries, and they make you pay by the inch. She wanted to be in the Washington Post. We couldn't afford even a truncated version. My feeling is, everyone who knew my sister knows what a marvelous woman she was, and the Washington Post can go chase itself. I bet they run Kim Kardashian's obituary for free.

What do any of us want to be remembered for? It was said of my aunt Kathleen that she made the best doughnuts in the Saint Croix Valley, although there was much more to her life than that. Of me, let them say that I made the best gumbo ya-ya in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, and that I was exceedingly fond of my family and friends. Not that I'm expecting to cash in my chips anytime soon, but, hey, you never know.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

The Jefferson Hotel Apple Cheddar Pie

When I left college in 1960 and went back to Arlington, Virginia, to live with my parents, my father gently prodded me to go out an get a job. The very next Monday he put the Help Wanted—Women section of the Washington Post in front of me at breakfast with a number of likely prospects circled, one of which was a job as a clerk in the library of the Post itself. (Yes, it was Help Wanted—Women. In the old days it was okay to blatantly discriminate.) Then he drove me into town—that is, Washington—and dropped me in front of the Post.

I was wearing a white blouse of my sister's, a straight black skirt (what they call nowadays a pencil skirt, though on an actual woman such a skirt bears no resemblance to a pencil), flesh-colored stockings (panty hose hadn't been invented yet), and plain black pumps. I mention this because my normal clothes were way more bohemian, tending toward black stockings, turtle neck sweaters, and those boho shoes from Greenwich Village whose brand name I can almost remember. Anyway, in the prissy clerk getup I successfully passed muster in the personnel office of the Washington Post. They gave me a stack of cards to alphabetize. When I had done this they sent me up to see Jack Burness, the boss of the library. In my sister's white blouse I impressed him as being sober and industrious, and he hired me. First full-time job I ever applied for. That I was hired was a fantastic piece of luck. I was too young and silly to appreciate it.

You're wondering what all this has to do with the pie.

The reason the Post needed a new clerk was that one of the old ones was leaving, Mr. Burness's second in command, an affable red-headed man by the name of Mark Hannan. He was so highly regarded that the library staff was taking him to a farewell luncheon at the Jefferson Hotel around the corner. I got to go, too. I was too cool to be impressed by the luxury of the surroundings at the Jefferson, and I can't remember what was for lunch, but for dessert they served a lattice-crust apple pie with cheddar cheese dribbled over it that lives on in my memory to this very day. From time to time over the years I've tried to replicate that pie, thinking, perhaps, that it would bring back a bit of my youth and innocence. Today I'm trying it again. There are hints on the internet of how to make an apple pie with cheese.

My dining room will not resemble the one in the wine cellar of the Jefferson Hotel.

I will come back and update this post as progress is made.

Kate Gallison

5:30 P.M.: The pie is in the oven. I took a picture of the apples before I started, and then a picture of the crust recipe I was going to use, from Fanny Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook, the edition my first husband's sister gave us for a wedding present fifty years or so ago. Using this recipe and a lot of experience in handling pie dough I got to be quite a good piecrust cook. Half butter and half lard makes the tenderest and flakiest crust, as long as you use ice water and handle it as little as possible.

Now that I have a food processor I find it much more convenient than messing around with two knives. Again, you develop your eye to know when the dough is mixed enough. Boy, howdy! Look here! Fanny has a recipe for cheese crust. Just the thing.

The apple filling is from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

I would have taken a picture of the rest of the process, but the camera's batteries went dead. Now that I've replaced them I'll take a picture of the pie when it comes out of the oven. It occurred to me that strewing grated cheddar all over the top of the lattice ten minutes before the pie was done would let the crust get brown and crispy without burning the cheese.

Hey, here it is! It's done! Now to wait until the guests arrive, when I'll reminisce about the Jefferson Hotel, and about the Washington Post in the days when Alfred Friendly was running the newsroom and Phil Graham was still alive. Ben Bradlee's obituaries this week brought back a lot of memories for me, though he wasn't there when I was. Pie is a good way to express nostalgia, don't you think?

That First Paycheck: Where did it Go?

Robin's post on Monday about the shoes took me back to the days when I was just out of college. The first full-time grownup job I ever had was as a library assistant for the world-renowned Washington Post. Nobody believes how stupid I was in those days, because with the glasses and the sober expression I impress people as being intelligent, and did even then, but the fact is I was so dumb I didn't know the publisher's name. Some woman called and wanted me to look something up for her. Said she was Phil Graham's secretary. I told her to call the public library.

Somehow I kept my job, in spite of that and other similar gaffes. I think the boss of the library liked me. Anyway the day came when I received my first paycheck. My mom wanted ten dollars out of it for room and board, and of course I needed bus fare and lunch money, but the rest went for a fantasy garment.

My first trench coat.

In this coat, as I skulked about the streets of D.C., I could pretend to be anything, a newspaper reporter, a foreigner, a spy, a woman of mystery generally. Anybody but me. Later paychecks went for record albums, shoes – the shoes I wore in those days! They don't make them like that any more – even a matching fedora. But that trench coat I wore for years and years, long after I lost my job at the Post, even long after the waterproofing wore off, shortening it as hemlines rose during the sixties. I forget what finally happened to it. I guess it disintegrated completely at last and went into the ragbag.

What did you buy with your first grownup paycheck?

Kate Gallison