Thursday, June 17, 2010

The Nature of Height

I miss The New York Times. Yes, I can, and I do, go to the online website, but come on—you know what I mean, I miss the “real” paper that you hold in your hands. The New York Times is one of my favorite things to do when I am in New York (or the library in Cincinnati that gets a copy of it a day late). It is careful reading, that paper. Each day, after I read, I wash the newsprint off my hands and think about the universal harmonies I discovered in the newspaper. I have a confession to make—one of my favorite sections to read is the obituary section, the “dead beat” as it is known in the news biz. My father often cracks the joke that at his age he checks the obituaries first just to make sure he’s not in them!

After the arts section, the obits are the next section I read in the Times. The obituary section teaches many things and somehow makes me think of guardian angels—do we have someone watching us, recording our moves, registering our work for posterity? Anyway, I love to read about the lives that the editors have deemed we should know about it. Is it an artist? A diplomat to the former USSR? Is it a child movie star? Is it a WWII pin-up? Is it an inventor of a cultural icon? A former press aide to a former president????

Somehow, these obits are never morbid—they really do make me think about universality and the times in which we live. The writers at the Times write lengthy feature stories, and they editorialize a little bit. Will it be a bracing reappraisal, a catty assessment or a hagiography? Was the subject a success or a failure? Was he or she lucky or doomed? Older than I am, or younger? Did he or she know how to live? I shake out the pages. Tell me the secret of a good life! Those obits in the Times tell me so much!

While certainly the fans of the obits aren’t as zealous as the fans of the sports pages, there is every bit of emotion of a good game in there. Read some of them—there is tension, entertainment, tragedy and comic relief. No, it is not morbid! There is a natural gravity to the obituaries, I mean after all, observe the human condition—life has a way of ending. But the good ones always let me in a little bit more of that secret of a good life…

Within a few days of each other in April, two people died whom I would venture to say never met each other, but when you read the obits and consider their lives, both teach a great deal about the secret of life and the nature of height. One subject, a 98-year old woman, was very tall, about six feet. And the other subject, a 94-year old man who never surpassed four feet seven inches. I saw the woman at a meeting once, in the summer of 2000, in Washington, and never forgot her elegance, her posture, her very presence. The other subject, the short man, I have never met but I have seen him dozens and dozens of times…oh, I will let the suspense grow to the next paragraph!!

The man was named Meinhardt Raabe—don’t think too hard, you probably won’t recognize his name. But you all know him! You all know him for 13 seconds of uncredited screen time. In his first and only Hollywood feature film, Meinhardt sang the following lines:

As coroner, I must aver
I thoroughly examined her.
And she’s not only merely dead,
She’s really most sincerely dead.



That’s it. Thirteen seconds of time in a beloved Hollywood classic (do I really have to name it? If so, you are banished to the un-pop culture world!) with his high-collared cloak and curly brimmed hat sung in a strange tone as he unfurled an outsize death certificate. Raabe announced to eternity that the Wicked Witch of the East was dead.

Of course it is always interesting to note the passing of the familiar and the strange (although Raabe must count as both!) but what stayed with me is how thoroughly interesting and inspiring the NYT obit about Menihardt Raabe’s life was. We know him for those 13 seconds, and the obit said that he repeated those seconds and bits of dialogue obligingly, “month in and month out for the next 70 years as a motivational speaker before school groups, Rotary Clubs, and Oz conventions.” What got me was the motivational speaker part. But after I read the obit, I wish I could have heard him speak.

From the obit I learned that “he did not hear the word dwarf or midget until he was a young adult….Growing up, he later said, he assumed there was no one else in the world like him.” In 1933 Mr. Raabe went to the World’s Fair in Chicago and saw a “Midget Village,” and soon became a barker at the fair. I learned that Mr. Raabe received a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Wisconsin, and later an MBA. Mr. Raabe was turned down time and again for jobs—many prospective employers telling him someone so short couldn’t be successful. Raabe was a skilled aviator in World War II—who would have thought? Even after the Civil Air Patrol almost rejected him, he persevered and later was decorated. Eventually Mr. Raabe joined Oscar Mayer as a salesman and for 30 years he traveled the United States as “Little Oscar—the World’s Smallest Chef.” Mr. Raabe was married for sixty years to another veteran of a midget vaudeville act. I also learned that Mr. Raabe was on hand in 2007 “when a star collectively honoring the Munchkins was unveiled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”

There was so much more to this man’s life than those thirteen seconds we have seen over and over…

In 2000 I spent the summer in sultry Washington, D.C. on one of my NEH seminars. I loved seeing all I could, soaking in the museums, and going to almost anything open to the public I could find. One of the things I did one day was attend a public meeting of the National Council of Negro Women (you might wonder why, since I am neither of those demographic groups! But I had just done a civil rights era trip to Mississippi that June and was interested in all such interesting things as the organizations that formed to fight for civil rights) and the president of the organization was there, and while I did not know who she was at first, I couldn’t help but be mesmerized by her presence. Tall, elegantly dressed with that gorgeous kind of church hat, probably in her 80s, I loved watching her as she presided over this meeting. I remember going back to look up on-line some things about her. Her name was Dorothy Height, and she had an impressive past.

When Ms. Height died this spring, the NYT obit writer called her “both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine.” The lesson continued: “One of the last living links to the social activism of the New Deal era, Ms. Height had a career in civil rights that spanned nearly 80 years, from anti-lynching protests in the early 1930s to the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. That the American social landscape looks as it does owes in no small part to her work.”

Now this is an obituary to sink your teeth into! A history lesson, yes, but so much more, and since I met her that one time a decade ago, I felt a little kinship, and certainly an enormous admiration for her. She founded many organizations, usually around the theme of women and civil rights, and the writer says we don’t know about her perhaps “because she was doubly marginalized, pushed offstage by women’s groups because of her race and by black groups because of her sex.”

But none of that seemed to stop her! While Mr. Raabe was marginalized because of his height, Ms. Height, had two targets, and neither of these people felt stifled and stilled by the social forces around them. Both of these people seemed to work quietly and firmly, getting ahead with energy and charisma and not taking no for an answer.

Ms. Height was born in 1912 in Virginia, suffered from asthma and was not expected to live past her teenage years. In high school she won an oratory contest (the all-white jury awarded her first prize) that gave her a four-year scholarship to college. She was enrolled at Barnard College in New York, but when she arrived, the dean turned her away. She could not enroll—Barnard had already met its quota for Negro students that year. Ms. Height got on a subway and went downtown and showed her letter and scholarship information to NYU. She was admitted at once.

Over the years Ms. Height directed the Harlem YWCA, and in 1946 she oversaw the desegregation of the facilities nationwide. She started numerous projects and programs in the Deep South, and on that historic day in August, 1963, Ms. Height sat on the platform an arm’s length from Dr. King as he delivered his epochal “I Have a Dream” speech. (Just as an interesting note, only men addressed the crowd that day.)

In the 1980s Ms. Height inaugurated a series of “Black Family Reunions” urging the black community to maintain strong family ties and community ties. Hundreds of thousands of people attend them every year. By this point she had become awarded over and over (75 years after turning her away, Barnard designated Ms. Height an honorary graduate) with presidential medals and bling (Both Clinton and Bush awarded her the nation’s highest civilian awards). In 2009 she sat an arm’s length from Barack Obama as he was sworn into office as the President.

These two nonagenarians led such interesting lives. Both faced hardships and both lived gracious, successful, invigorating lives. Think of what they have seen in the 90+ years they graced our planet! I met one for an hour once, and I saw the other on television over and over, but what a lesson of how we pigeonhole people. I daresay it would be hard to sum up such compelling lives but we do it all the time. We reduce people and events and experiences to a sound bite, or maybe we even allow them a full 13 seconds…but think of the richness beyond those obvious flickers in time…

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