Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
After my cross-country trip in 1993, I covered the theater for the
Times
as a reporter,
then was sent to the metro desk for a stint on general assignment, writing about the
fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, the world chess championships, and the
Woody Allen-Mia Farrow connubial strife, among other things. In 1997, I was posted to
Chicago as a cultural correspondent, traveling all over the country for stories about the
arts (what a fabulous gig that was!), and I wrote a kid's book with the tap dancer Savion
Glover. In 1999, I was brought back to New York and became a theater critic, and then,
after four years left the arts section and became a kind of lifestyle reporter covering re-
creation. (In twenty-five years at the
Times
, I think I've had four bylines above the fold
on the front page, and one was for a story about the national baton twirling champion-
ships.) In 2006, I took a leave from the paper for a couple of years to write a book about
baseball umpires.
So that's the résumé—another way to measure time.
When I came back to the
Times
in 2008 I joined the obits desk, and for good or ill, it
feels like a final resting place, journalistically speaking. (Though I hope it's not; one of
the reasons I got on my bike this summer was to tell a story that looks forward and not
back.)
In any case, over the last three years I've written more than three hundred obits, ren-
dering, as entertainingly and informatively as possible in a handful of hours before dead-
line, the lives of scientists, inventors, writers, actors, musicians, historians, politicians,
lawyers, jurists, filmmakers, impressionists, cartoonists, athletes, adventurers, and journ-
alists in concise blocs of six hundred, eight hundred, or a thousand words that generally
appear deep in the B section of the daily paper. You get accustomed to acknowledging
mortality in a casual, less than awestruck, not even solemn way. We have a file in the de-
partment, people who we've heard are seriously ailing, called “Circling the Drain.” Every
morning I go to the office and ask, sometimes literally, “Who's dead?”
It's a job that accommodates list making and name dropping.
To wit: I did a guy who hijacked an airplane and a guy who helped find Hitler's will.
I did a founder of the Heritage Foundation and a defender of the Chicago Seven. I did a
Black Panther (two, actually) and a South African white separatist. I did the model for
Lois Lane and the model for the Dustin Hoffman character in
Rain Man
. I did a Swiss
yodeling champion, a British snooker champion, an American Ping-Pong champion, a
boxing world champion, an Olympic gymnastics champion, and a judge whose ruling al-
lowed girls to play Little League. I did the founder of the Gap and the creator of
Hazel
. I
did an eleven-year-old who appeared in
The Lion King
and a one-hundred-and-four-year-
old who laid claim to having written “The Hokey Pokey.” I did two Golden Girls and two
Redgraves (three, if you count Natasha Richardson). I did George Carlin, David Foster
