Drama in the Deeds of Unsung Heroes and Scamps : It’s Time They Put Life on Obit Page

Horses, they have track records. Right there in the racing form.

Won. Lost. Sire. Dam. Purses. Best times.

People, they just get obituaries. Seventy-five years in the trenches and the hometown paper kisses people goodby as if they spent their lives as assistant purchasing agents for Ajax Manufacturing Co. after graduating from West Fork High School. Funeral services 11 a.m. Tuesday.

Women, they’re lucky to make the obit pages at all because all they ever did was to raise three children, wash the dog after it chased a skunk and make the beds every morning.

Where’s the meat?

Shakespeare’s Marc Antony says “ . . . the good is oft interred with their bones . . . “

No offense, Will, but the good stuff is always interred with their bones.

Take the late Col. Fraser Moffat. The alumni magazine of his alma mater paid due respect to his business and military career. But nowhere did it mention that well into life he could still balance a dozen empty beer bottles end on end.

Gave Last Rites

The father of a colleague gave his own father last rites three times, unnecessarily as it turned out. Being about 10, he didn’t exactly know procedure so he tried three different versions to spread-eagle possibilities. Think that stopped any presses? Nope. He was publicly remembered, albeit justly, for managing restaurants.

Obits will list survivors, but rarely, unless you’re a ruling monarch, ancestors. There’s a happy housewife I met in California who has survived descent from Jesse and Frank James, the Youngers and the Daltons without robbing nary a bank. Not obit material in spite of what it may tell us about the sins of the father or even dead cousins.

In life we are surrounded by “what ifs” and other narrow escapes. Not in death. I had an uncle whose father promised to take him to the new nickelodeon for his 10th birthday. The morning of the great event he had sniffles. His mother, a no-nonsense ex-schoolteacher, wouldn’t let him out of the house. That’s why he wasn’t sitting in a reserved front row seat when the Iroquois Theater burned down in Chicago in 1903 killing 602 people. His escape never made the prints until now.

So how come obits never say what made us cry at the funeral and laugh at the wake?

Alumni magazines are particularly remiss. Most of ‘em just say “deceased.” But part of the news is how our old pals departed this realm and what they’d done since we last saw them pouring milk punch over their heads at senior house parties. Did they make a hole-in-one? Win a lottery? Scale K2?

Don’t Ask Obit

Did they die in a bar fight in the Klondike? Lose a duel to a jealous husband? Did their parachutes fail to open? Don’t ask the obit.

There’s a tradition at Princeton University for freshmen to try and climb up the ivy at Nassau Hall and steal the clapper from the bell so everyone will have an excuse for not getting to 8 o’clock class on time. Well, I know a guy who not only got the clapper, he also found out where they hid all the spare clappers and pinched them too. Obit matter? You kidding?

Last words get dropped from our lives as well. When Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright, lay dying, his night nurse told the day nurse the patient seemed to be slightly better.

“Tvertimod,” gasped the failing Ibsen. In English that says: “On the contrary.” Obits never give us a chance to say: “So long.”

To clinch my case I give you Jack Bainton and the cow business.

Who?

John William Bainton. Friend. Dead the other day, age 63. “At his death Mr. Bainton was . . . “ That’s what the obit said in two paragraphs of a large metropolitan daily. OK, that paper’s obit page is harder to get into than heaven, so they may be forgiven for not getting the rest of the story. But there’s no sense waiting around for Paul Harvey to come up with it.

John William Bainton was born in Brooklyn. If Brooklyn were an Oriental bazaar, Mr. Bainton would have ended up selling flying carpets that turned into 747s. Maybe your sister married the type. A visionary. Early on.

Right after World War II there was a restriction on exporting non-essential vehicles to a war-impoverished world. So Mr. Bainton whitewashed some station wagons, painted red crosses on them and shipped them to Brazil as ambulances--until one day there was a cloudburst. He assured authorities he would never do it again, and didn’t. But they never found out about the ambulances that had gone to Turkey where it never rains.

After selling the idea of centrifuging to the Peruvians to help make them one of the world’s leading fish-meal producers, Mr. Bainton settled in the Bahamas helping advise one of Canada’s richest men what to do with 3,000 acres he owned, since you can build just so many resorts and golf courses.

Build a Dairy

Build a dairy, said Mr. Bainton, while everyone else laughed because the land was coral and prickly bushes. Based on his own research, plus a hunch that defied conventional geology, he claimed that there would be soil underneath the coral. He was right. So what to do with the coral? Build a rock-crushing plant to extract the lime to build the cinder-block houses Bahamians live in. Then find cows that prosper in the semi-tropics, plant crops and start milking.

The Bahamas at the time imported 95% of its milk from Miami, so by the time it arrived in the islands, it was already a day toward sour. Mr. Bainton’s dairy eventually was producing almost as much milk as the Bahamians could drink.

He later had a business that made bricks out of garbage, pioneered in embryo implants to improve cattle breeds and proposed making a massive banana plantation in Oyster Bay, N.Y., under the world’s largest greenhouse, heated by a refuse incinerator. He never got around to building the power plant he figured would have lit up all Nassau by producing electricity from the up-welling thermal currents in the ocean.

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,” wrote the poet Thomas Gray after ruminating in a country graveyard.

Gray really sounds like he just finished reading an obit page.