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Steve Albini (BSJ85)

Reprinted from Pitchfork.com
Photo credit: Casey Mitchell

Steve Albini, an icon of indie rock as both a producer and performer, died on Tuesday, May 7, of a heart attack, staff at his recording studio, Electrical Audio, confirmed to Pitchfork. As well as fronting underground rock lynchpins including Shellac and Big Black, Albini was a legend of the recording studio, though he preferred the term “engineer” to “producer.” He recorded Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, and countless more classic albums, and remained an outspoken critic of exploitative music industry practices until his final years. Shellac were preparing to tour their first album in a decade, To All Trains, which is scheduled for release next week. Steve Albini was 61 years old.

Despite his insistence that he would work with any artist who paid his fee, Albini’s catalog as a self-described audio engineer encompasses a swath of alternative rock that is practically a genre unto itself. After early work on Surfer Rosa, Slint’s Tweez, and the Breeders’ Pod, he became synonymous with brutal, live-sounding analog production that carried palpable raw energy. His unparalleled résumé in the late 1980s and 1990s includes the Jesus Lizard’s influential early albums, the Wedding Present’s Seamonsters, Brainiac’s Hissing Prigs in Static Couture, and records by Low, Dirty Three, Helmet, Boss Hog, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Hum, Superchunk, and dozens more. His influence rang through to the next generations of rock, punk, and metal at home and abroad, many of whom he went on to produce—the likes of Mogwai, Mclusky, Cloud Nothings, Mono, Ty Segall, and Sunn O))). He also recorded enduring greats of the singer-songwriter canon: Joanna Newsom’s Ys, Nina Nastasia’s early records, and much of the Jason Molina catalog among them.

Albini was born in Pasadena, California, and lived a peripatetic childhood before his family settled in Missoula, Montana. As a teenager, his discovery of Ramones transformed what he described, to Jeremy Gordon for The Guardian, as a “normal Montana childhood” into an altogether wilder entity. In the subsequent years, while studying journalism in Illinois, he was drawn into the Chicago punk scene that his music would come to both defy and define. Albini spent his days at the record store Wax Trax, buying every record that “looked interesting” and talking to “everybody with a funny haircut,” he told NPR.

“It was an extremely active, very fertile scene where everybody was participating on every level,” Albini said of Chicago’s music scene. “The community that I joined when I came to Chicago enabled me to continue on with a life in music. I didn’t do this by myself. I did this as a participant in a scene, in a community, in a culture, and when I see somebody extracting from that rather than participating in it as a peer, it makes me think less of that person.… My participation in all of this is going to come to an end at some point. The only thing that I can say for myself is that, along the way, it was a cool thing that I participated in, and on the way out, I want to make sure that I don’t take it with me.”

He began recording as Big Black in the early 1980s, channeling antisocial, sometimes violent themes through buzzsaw riffs and histrionic barks, grunts, and whelps, at first backed only by a drum machine (which remained a constant, pounding presence) and soon joined by Naked Raygun’s Jeff Pezzati and Santiago Durango; Dave Riley replaced Pezzati on bass for the band’s two landmark studio albums, Atomizer and Songs About Fucking. In his spare time, Albini would pen screeds in the 1980s zine Matter, admonishing bands in neighboring scenes and cementing the firebrand reputation that established him as an eminent rock grouch and refusenik.

After Big Black, Albini formed the short-lived Rapeman—a name he came to regret, despite the sardonic intent—before founding Shellac in the early 1990s, with Bob Weston and Todd Trainer. After a string of EPs through his longtime home of Touch and Go and Drag City, the band extensively toured (including an all-but-residency at Primavera Sound, the only music festival Albini was happy to play) and released five beloved albums: 1994’s At Action Park, 1998’s Terraform, 2000’s 1000 Hurts, 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound, and 2014’s Dude Incredible.

Albini has long been admired for sticking to his principles and questioning music industry standards, especially in the recording studio. He never took royalties from records on which he worked—including Nirvana’s In Utero, which has sold over 15 million copies—despite that being industry custom, and he kept his day rates low, especially for a producer with his pedigree. At Electrical Audio, his recording studio where he and staff members helped lay bricks in the construction process, Albini was famous for handing artists a yellow legal pad on the first day and instructing them to map out a written description of every song they were going to record. This was his way of avoiding future miscommunications and guaranteeing that artists maximized the in-studio time for which they paid. “The recording part is the part that matters to me—that I’m making a document that records a piece of our culture, the life’s work of the musicians that are hiring me,” he told The Guardian. “I take that part very seriously. I want the music to outlive all of us.”

Several bands have recounted experiences when Albini was behind the board reading a book or playing Scrabble during their recording sessions. As Albini explained it, this method helped keep his senses sharp and widened his perspective. “When I first started making records I would sit in front of the console concentrating on the music every second. I found out the hard way that I tended to fiddle with things unnecessarily and records ended up sounding tweaked and weird. I developed a couple of techniques to avoid this,” he explained in a Reddit AMA. “This has proven to be a really good threshold, so that if anything sounds weird or someone says something you immediately give it your full attention and your concentration hasn’t been ruined by staring at the speakers and straining all day.”

Throughout his career, Albini courted controversy through provocative band names (Rapeman, Run N***er Run), song titles ( “Pray I Don’t Kill You F***ot,” “My Black Ass”), and offhand statements (“I want to strangle Odd Future”). While he refused to apologize for his choice in names and jokes, in Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life, Albini made it clear that he believed his real stances on race, gender, LGBTQ rights, and politics were obvious. “I have less respect for the man who bullies his girlfriend and calls her ‘Ms’ than a guy who treats women reasonably and respectfully and calls them ‘Yo! Bitch,’” Albini told Azerrad. “The point of all this is to change the way you live your life, not the way you speak.”

Later in life, however, Albini repeatedly apologized for his past controversies, realizing that intent and moral clarity went only so far. “A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them. It’s nobody’s obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself,” Albini wrote on X in 2021. “If anything, we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while laboring under the tacit *mistaken* notion that things were getting better. I’m overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit. Believe me, I’ve met my share of punishers at gigs and I sympathize with anybody who isn’t me but still had to suffer them.” He talked in depth about his regrets with The Guardian, MEL Magazine, and others.

Amid all of his ongoing work, Albini was a remarkable poker player. In 2022, he won a World Series of Poker gold bracelet after beating 773 other players in the $1,500 entry H.O.R.S.E. competition for a huge prize of $196,089. While most players dressed in button-up shirts and plain tees, Albini wore a furry, white hat shaped like a bear and a red Jack O’ Nuts shirt, saying the Athens noise-rock musicians “bring me luck.” He won another WSOP gold bracelet in 2018 for beating 310 players in seven card stud to the tune of $105,629. Back then, he was wearing a Cocaine Piss shirt during the big win. He had a massive grin on his face in the photos documenting both wins.

When asked how his career would be regarded if he ever retired, Albini told The Guardian, “I don’t give a shit. I’m doing it, and that’s what matters to me—the fact that I get to keep doing it. That’s the whole basis of it. I was doing it yesterday, and I’m gonna do it tomorrow, and I’m gonna carry on doing it.”

https://pitchfork.com/news/steve-albini-storied-producer-and-icon-of-the-rock-underground-dies-at-61/

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1980s Featured Legacies

Melissa George Lindland (MSJ88)

Melissa George Lindland, age 60, of Chicago, IL, died peacefully at home surrounded by her family on January 7, 2024. Melissa was the loving wife of Matthew Lindland and dedicated mother to four children: Clara, 27, of Arlington, VA; Robert, 25, of New York City; Christopher, 23, of Chicago; and Jane, 20, a junior at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

A resident of Chicago since 1991, she and Matt were married at St. Chrysostom’s Church in Chicago in 1993. Together, they lived in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, and, in 2004, built a home together in Andersonville, which Melissa designed. This is the home their four children have been raised in over the past 19 years.

Born in Chicago to Nancy Jane Connery and Alfred George, Melissa was raised in Wilmette, IL. She was a graduate ofs New Trier High School, Loyola University of Chicago, and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

After receiving her master’s degree, she was a reporter for newspapers in Florida and Madison, WI; for Reuters in New York and Chicago; and for Crain’s Chicago Business.

Melissa is remembered by her family and friends as a tenacious and loving advocate and supporter. She used the skills she honed as a reporter, such as confronting civic corruption, and turned them toward seeking out and getting access to the best resources for her children. As a result, they embraced the opportunities she made available and excelled. Whether finding pre-dawn sports training or getting everyone going on a long mountain hike, Melissa modeled a focus on inquisitive research and follow-through that was much to her family’s benefit.

Melissa’s debilitating ailments began in late 2019. She spent years thoroughly researching her symptoms and found that the source stemmed from Loeys-Dietz Syndrome – a rare genetic disorder that affects the production of collagen and connective tissue. She is at rest after four years of aggressively treating and enduring the manifestations of this disease throughout her body.

Melissa is survived by her husband, Matthew and her four adult children, Clara, Robert, Christopher, and Jane. She was a loving sister to John George of Glenview, IL, Jane George of Chicago, IL, and her deceased sister, Regina George Tobin. If you are so inclined, in lieu of flowers or other tributes, we ask that you remember Melissa by supporting the Loeys-Dietz Syndrome Foundation at www.loeysdietz.org.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/chicagotribune/name/melissa-lindland-obituary?id=54090525

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Sheila Lorelle Jack (MSJ85)

Sheila Lorelle Jack was born May 26, 1953 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as the youngest child to the late Robert D. Jack, Sr., and the late Alberta V. Jack Scott. She was a beautiful, intelligent social butterfly, sincerely loved by her family and many dear friends. Her innate desire for knowledge led her to pursue an impressive career that allowed her to work in a variety of sectors including government, academia, and nonprofit. Sheila’s achievements included being a college lecturer, seasoned communications director, and Emmy award-winning producer.

Sheila was educated in Harrisburg public schools and graduated with honors from John Harris Senior High School. She chose to attend Spelman College where she joined the lifelong sisterhood of Delta Sigma Theta, Inc. before graduating cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English. Sheila continued her education at the University of Michigan, earning a master’s in urban planning with a concentration in housing and real estate.

Years later, she returned to her English educational roots and earned a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. She flourished in the communications field and worked at WUSA TV Channel 9, Washington, DC as a news Associate Producer and Public Affairs Producer; Reporter for WHMT Channel 17, Albany, NY; Press Secretary, New York City Human Resources Administration, New York, NY; National Director, Media and Press Relations for the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, White Plains, NY; Deputy Director of Marketing and Communications, Mayor Bill Campbell’s administration, Atlanta, GA; Director of Communications and Special Assistant to the President, Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA; Associate Director, Diversity Outreach, Alzheimer’s Association, Chicago, IL; Media Specialist, United States Census Bureau, Atlanta, GA; Communications Consultant, Cascade United Methodist Church, Atlanta, GA.

Sheila’s tenacity and hard work was recognized when she was awarded two Emmy Awards from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences – Washington, DC Chapter for Outstanding Program Achievement for, “Alzheimer’s: The Painful Enigma” and “Deaf Rights Now!” Additionally, she received nine Emmy nominations in that market between 1985 and 1989.

Sheila volunteered and participated in several organizations including The Junior League; Leadership New York (1992-1993); National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ); Atlanta Association of Black Journalists (AABJ); and East Point/College Park Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, Inc.

Sheila was a loyal, proud, and active member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She valued the friendships of her Delta Sisters, attended national conventions, regional conferences, local chapter events, and get-togethers with her line sisters. Sheila touched the lives of many people with her innate ability to engage in interesting conversations which could range from discussing politics to reality TV. She also just loved having a good chat.

Sheila always expressed her love to her close-knit family and enjoyed family get-togethers. She is survived by her sisters, Barbara A. Freeland of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Gloria E. Jack of Fairburn, Georgia, as well as her brothers, Wayne S. Jack of Atlanta, Georgia and Michael S. Jack of College Park, Georgia. Also surviving are six nieces, three nephews, six great-nieces, four great-nephews, one great-great-nephew, and a host of cherished cousins. Sheila’s two oldest brothers, Robert D. Jack, Jr., and Lawrence E. Jack preceded her in transitioning into eternal life.

https://obits.pennlive.com/us/obituaries/pennlive/name/sheila-jack-obituary?id=53683980

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William Snider (MSJ85)

William (Bill) Joseph Snider died June 20, 2023, at age 62 after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Bill grew up in the small Ohio town of Litchfield. He called himself a NASA baby, as his parents met working for NASA. He shared fond memories of his father creating intricate model airplanes and flying them on the weekends with friends. Bill found comfort early on in books and took to reading incessantly for the rest of his life.
Bill made his journey across the country to study Economics at Occidental College in Southern California. He spoke fondly of his introduction to fresh foods in the cafeteria that opened his world to the joys of flavor. While in school, he took trips with a friend to Tijuana to build houses for those without. He even took a creative writing class with the then future president Barack Obama when Bill just knew him as “Barry”.

After college, Bill found work in the area setting up and maintaining the Grand Prix equestrian jumping standards. He then got a bit more serious and earned a Master’s Degree in Journalism at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois.

Bill focused his writing career on K-12 education. He wrote for Education Week with his best friend, Blake Rodman, while they lived together in Washington D.C.

He was introduced to his former wife, B. Ann Matthews, at Kramer Books & Afterwords Cafe through their beloved late friend and chef, Damien. Bill and Ann married in North Carolina, where Ann was from, in the summer of 1990.
They later moved to San Francisco where Bill worked his way up to becoming the editor of Edutopia, published by the George Lucas Education Foundation.

The couple next moved to Greensboro, N.C., where in 1996 their daughter, Roxanne, was born. From that point on, she was the light of Bill’s life.

A lifelong passion for food led Bill to switch career paths. He taught himself how to bake artisan breads, hoping to fill a gaping hole in the local biscuit and cornbread cuisine. He liked to say that baking cured his habits of procrastination and being easily distracted.
Bill and Ann opened Simple Kneads Bakery in 2001. The bakery was beloved by many. The Asiago Peppercorn bread was a favorite, although some would argue the olive bread was better.
Ten years ago, he met his love, Margaret McEnally, who allowed him to share her life. They created a loving home together with her young daughter, Leslie, which brought Bill great comfort and joy.
Bill enjoyed watching golf on TV and said it was the perfect background for taking naps.

During his last days, his daughter, Roxanne, who he said was his greatest legacy, asked him if he had any advice. He responded: “keep it balanced” and “love is the most important thing.”
In his final FaceBook post, he wrote, “Here’s the secret to a happy life: ‘Accept what you cannot change and be grateful for every little thing.'”
He is predeceased by his brother Steven James Snider and survived by his daughter, Roxanne Snider, longtime partner, Margaret McEnally, and step-daughter, Leslie Rudd, as well as his siblings Patricia Lorene Humphress, Diane Elaine Snider, and Michael Edward Snider.

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John Czarobski (MSJ88)

John Czarobski was tragically struck and killed by a car Jan. 24, 2023 in Portland, Ore. Originally hailing from Chicago’s south side, John was the fifth child of Edward And Louise.
John studied journalism at Marquette University and then later received an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg school of business. He settled into a successful career in the Chicago ad industry. Notably, the latter portion of his work life was dedicated to assisting civic integration of renewable energy capabilities while minimizing consumption. John proudly played a key role in the development of “Project Footprint,” a branding campaign associated with Hawaii’s laudable efforts to go fully renewable by 2045.
John was a drummer in several rock and roll bands, an experienced sailor having navigated rocks and reefs and many a foul weather system to earn frivolity on foreign shores. He was perhaps the world’s most avid Bruce Springsteen fan having found a lifetime of wisdoms buried in the Boss’ life of accumulated works.
John leaves behind his daughter, Grace; his brother, Art and spouse, Kerry; his sister, Teresa and spouse, Denny; sisters-in-law, Annette and Maria; as well as numerous nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews. He was predeceased by his father, Edward; his mother, Louise; and his brothers, Edward and Gerald. John also leaves innumerable friends and associates that have been forever touched personally and professionally by his easy humor, his patient, soulful and nurturing optimism or his organized and steady hand as boardroom leader or mentor.
In later life John consciously eschewed the trappings of material accumulation and chose instead to invest his resources in expansive life experience via travel and adventure. His home was found with folders full of thoughts, poems and song lyrics scribbled in parallel with marketing concepts and outreach ideas. One such scribble: “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy then an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to greet a new and different sun.”

Obituary

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Dee Richard Woolley Jr. (MSJ83)

Dee Richard Woolley Jr., beloved husband, father, brother, grandfather, and friend, age 66, passed away July 15, 2022 in his home unexpectedly.

Born June 21, 1956, Salt Lake City, Utah, to Dee and Marjorie Carol Springman Woolley. Married Anne Meilstrup Woolley August 1, 1978, in the Salt Lake City LDS Temple. He graduated from Highland High (class of 74), University of Utah (BA) and Northwestern University (Masters in Advertising). He served in many capacities in his church, including an LDS Mission to Germany and later as a beloved Bishop in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His great loves in life were his testimony of Heavenly Father and Jesus, his family, his dear friends, music, food, and the Book of Mormon. He is survived by his wife Anne; his children Doug (Amy), Katherine Gardner (Joel), Elizabeth, and Christina Pearson (Patrick); 8 grandchildren; and brother Michael (Debra). He was preceded in death by his parents, Dee and Carol Woolley.

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Kari Howard (MSJ85)

Visit the tribute site created by her friends and colleagues.

LA Times Obit

Kari Howard (MSJ85) a longtime Los Angeles Times editor who championed ambitious narrative journalism and helped edit the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on California’s drought, died January 10, 2022, of cancer. She was 59.

Howard, a lover of music and writing who frequently quoted favorite songs and story sentences, worked as assistant foreign editor before becoming editor of Column One, the newspaper’s front-page narrative showcase. She sent out weekly emails in which she riffed on the musical associations of recent stories. A 2015 story about the effect of drought on giant sequoias, for example, reminded her of Jake Bugg’s “Pine Trees.”

“She exuded a love of language and had an incredible ability to help writers tell the stories they wanted to tell,” Times managing editor Scott Kraft said. “Writers loved working with her because she made them so much better. She loved stories and she had an innate sense of how to turn a draft of a story into something that was truly special.”

Howard was one of the editors for Diana Marcum’s series on the human consequences of California’s protracted drought, which won the Pulitzer for feature writing the following year.

“We were like one brain with that series,” Marcum said. “We would finish each other’s sentences. She never saw those stories as being about the drought. She saw those stories as being about people showing hope and resilience and character during a hard time.”

For Christmas that year, she bought Marcum a first edition of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” one of many books she gave her.

“She did everything with this sense of passion and integrity and whimsy,” Marcum said. “She had such a mix of steely resolve and whimsy.”

At The Times, Howard met her future husband, journalist Geoffrey Kelly, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack in Hong Kong in 2007.

Reporters sought out Howard to help them elevate their work and coach them through complicated stories. When she was honored with a Times editorial award in 2015, the judges noted “she sprinkled her pixie dust on more than 100 Column Ones, displaying talents that had writers throughout the building knocking on her door with ideas or simply seeking her advice about storytelling.”

When she left The Times in 2015, Howard wrote a farewell note to the staff, saying: “For those of you who don’t know why I’m leaving, I bought a farmhouse in a town called Liberty six years ago, and it’s time I finally started a new life, and new adventure, in Maine.”

She chopped her own firewood, took pleasure in renovating the farmhouse, and posted frequent rhapsodies to the area on Instagram, with images of wild lilies, lighthouses and the Oldest Shoe Store in America.

In one post, she ran a photo of her home office with vibrant foliage visible through the windows: “Globe. Books. Typewriter. Cat. Foliage. What else do you need?”

Howard went on to edit Storyboard, the narrative website of the Nieman Foundation, and in early 2018 became the London-based storytelling editor at the Reuters news service. She described her journalism mantra as “Examine closely. Connect with people. Don’t rush.”

Her new home inspired characteristic enthusiasm. “I’m about to bore everyone on Instagram with my new obsession: the signage, shutters and shiny doors of Spitalfields,” she wrote. “I live in this little pocket of early 18th century Georgian homes, and it’s like a movie set. (Apparently it literally is, because period movies like anything Austen are filmed here.)”

Howard was born in Manchester, N.H., and her father’s work as a telecommunications engineer took her from Arkansas to Scotland as a girl. She studied engineering herself briefly at Clemson University in South Carolina.

“She realized after a semester that wasn’t her calling,” said her sister, Alison Howard, a Seattle attorney.

Howard studied literature at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and journalism at Medill. She worked as a copy editor at the Houston Chronicle and the Abilene Reporter-News before joining The Times in 1992.

Howard was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, with the disease already in an advanced stage. She returned to Maine from London late last year and continued working for Reuters until recent weeks.

“As you can tell from my Instagram, I’m not focused on the illness,” she wrote recently to a friend. “I’m trying to find joy in the smallest things. And it’s everywhere, isn’t it? I’m amazed by the world, and I’m so lucky and grateful for it all.”

Along with her sister, Howard is survived by her mother, Diane, of Phoenix.

https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2022-01-10/kari-howard-times-editor-who-championed-narrative-writing-dead-at-59

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Valerie Boyd (BSJ85)

Photo: Valerie Boyd, the author of a critically acclaimed biography of Zora Neale Hurston, appears at a reading in D.C. in 2009. (Susan Biddle/The Washington Post)

By Emily Langer, Washington Post

Valerie Boyd, a journalist who chronicled the life of Zora Neale Hurston in a critically acclaimed biography and edited a forthcoming compilation of the journals of Alice Walker, thus illuminating African American women of letters from the Harlem Renaissance to the present day, died Feb. 12 at a hospital in Atlanta. She was 58.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said her friend and power of attorney, Veta Goler.

Ms. Boyd spent nearly two decades as a reporter and arts editor at her hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, training the journalistic eye that she would turn on Hurston in the biography that became her first major literary achievement of her own.

“Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in 2003, was the result of nearly five years of research. Ms. Boyd charted Hurston’s life from her birth in 1891 in Notasulga, Ala., to her upbringing in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Fla., through her literary activity during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and her anthropological exploration of African American folklore, to the circumstances that led to her death in penury in 1960 in Florida, where she was buried in an unmarked grave.

“Because I am a Black Southern woman, I felt very close to Zora, as if I could paint a picture of her life almost from the inside out,” Ms. Boyd told an interviewer for the online magazine In Motion. “I wanted to give readers a sense of what it was like to be Zora, to walk in her shoes, to live inside her skin.”

Ms. Boyd’s 2003 biography of writer Zora Neale Hurston. (Scribner)
Ms. Boyd was an undergraduate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., when she first read Hurston’s best-known work, the 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” a coming-of-age story about a Black woman named Janie Crawford.

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“I was just amazed,” Ms. Boyd said, “that a book published in 1937 could speak to me so clearly and so resonantly through the decades.”

Years later, she became a regular attendee of the annual festival held in honor of Hurston in Eatonville. In 1994, she said, she attended a speech there by Robert E. Hemenway, the author of a 1977 biography of the writer.

By Ms. Boyd’s account, Hemenway surveyed the shortcomings that he said were inherent in his book as a work about a Black woman written by a White man. According to Ms. Boyd, he said that Hurston was owed a new biography, by an African American woman.

“When I heard those words, I felt it was my calling,” Ms. Boyd told an interviewer with Northwestern. “But even though it felt like something I would do, the thought of doing it was just frightening.”

She put off the task, judging herself not ready. Less than two years later, a literary agent called to ask if she might be interested in writing a biography of Hurston. “I felt like fate was calling me — and that Zora herself was calling me,” Ms. Boyd said.

Hurston had complicated the job of any future biographer, Ms. Boyd wrote, by disguising “many truths of her life in a confounding but crackable code.” In order to obtain schooling at a Baltimore high school, she reported her age as 16 when she was in fact 26. Her 1942 autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road,” however skillfully written, proved an unreliable account of the facts of her life.

With the passage of time, more dust, as it were, had clouded the story of Hurston’s life. It had been partially cleared by Hemenway’s book and by volumes including “Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters” collected and edited by Carla Kaplan (2002). But in “Wrapped in Rainbows,” reviewer Jake Lamar wrote in The Washington Post, Ms. Boyd produced a “scrupulously researched, gracefully written” work that will “most likely remain the definitive Hurston biography for many years to come.”

Ms. Boyd’s project was a journalistic odyssey, in which she located the few living acquaintances of Hurston and scoured the archival records of her life. But it was also an “intuitive, spiritual process,” she said.

“Sometimes,” she told the Northwestern interviewer, “it seemed as if Zora would look at me in a very approving way, and sometimes she seemed to be looking at me like, ‘Oh, please.’ And I would dutifully press delete.”

Ms. Boyd often reflected on the sisterhood of African American writers, observing that “Zora’s, Alice’s and my generations are holding hands.” Alice was Alice Walker, the author of the 1982 novel “The Color Purple,” which received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for fiction and was adapted into a 1985 film starring Whoopi Goldberg. Walker had helped reawaken interest in Hurston with an article, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in Ms. magazine in 1975.

Ms. Boyd happened to meet Walker during her research for the biography and said that Walker, upon learning of her work, touched her face and said, “Bless you, my child.” Some years after the publication of the Hurston biography, when Walker set out to publish her journals from the years 1965 to 2000, she selected Ms. Boyd as her partner in the endeavor.

“Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker,” edited by Ms. Boyd, is slated to be published April 12, according to the publishing house Simon and Schuster.

“Valerie Boyd was one of the best people ever to live, which she did as a free being,” Walker said in a statement provided by the Joy Harris Literary Agency. “Even though illness was stalking her the past several years, she accompanied me in gathering, transcribing, and editing my journals. … This was a major feat, a huge act of love and solidarity, of sisterhood, of soul generosity and shared joy, for which she will be remembered.”

Valerie Jean Boyd was born in Atlanta on Dec. 11, 1963. Her father ran a gas station and tire shop, and her mother was a homemaker.

Ms. Boyd received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern in 1985 and a master of fine arts in creative nonfiction writing from Goucher College in Towson, Md., in 1999.

In addition to her work at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Ms. Boyd freelanced over the years for publications including The Washington Post. She was a senior editor at the publication the Bitter Southerner. In recent years, she was a writer in residence and professor at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia

At the time of her death, according to Simon and Schuster, Ms. Boyd was at work on an anthology titled “Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic.” Her survivors include two brothers.

Ms. Boyd noted that, in deference to her subject, she had visited Hurston’s grave in Fort Pierce, Fla., before embarking on the biography.

“I wanted to make a connection with Zora,” Ms. Boyd told the Journal-Constitution, “so I took an offering of Florida oranges, which she loved, and some money — she never had enough money in her life — and a pack of Pall Malls.”

Just as she was leaving, she saw a black crow similar to the one that had circled over the inaugural Hurston festival in 1990. Attendees had named it “Zora.” Ms. Boyd took the sign as permission to proceed.

“I believe that it was something that I was put here to do,” she told the Orlando Sentinel in 2003. “My destiny led me to Zora.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/02/15/zora-neale-hurston-biographer-valerie-boyd/?utm_campaign=wp_about_us&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_aboutus&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F361358f%2F620f8a5d9d2fda34e7992da9%2F61e19e609bbc0f2783c953a8%2F38%2F59%2F620f8a5d9d2fda34e7992da9

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1980s Featured Legacies Featured Legacies Home Home Legacies

Susan M. Tomaro (BSJ89, MSJ89)

Susan Mae Tomaro (1966-2021) loved life and loved her family, both given and chosen. She was the most beautiful, generous and loving soul. She was tender, gentle and kind. She gave fully of herself to both loved ones and acquaintances. 

Susan was the best partner that her husband Mark Delucchi could ask for. She completed him in every way. She was his North Star, his everything. She deeply loved her children. Clare, Celeste and Nicholas were her world. Everything she did was for them. Everyday, we see Susan in them as they express their excitement and joy, as they show tenderness and love, as they face challenges with grace and determination, and as they combat injustices with their wisdom and strength. They are amazing children because of her.

Family was important for Susan. Her grandmother, Susan, and her father, Nick, were very much a part of how she lived out her love and life. Though far from family, she was always connected to the love of her mother, Jeanne; her aunt and uncle, Kathy and Bob; her siblings Cindy & John and Nick & Blyth; and Kayla, Jordan, Anna and Jay. She loved the warmth and caring she received from Mark’s family, particularly his mother Carol and Godmother Marie.

She loved and pampered our dog, Momo, and Wrigley & Sammy before him. Susan loved taking the dogs on walks in the Grove, Stow Lake and the beach. She treasured time in the water and being in nature. Swimming, paddling, camping and hiking were sacred times for her in places like Big Basin, Moab, Crane Cove and in our National Parks. There she would connect with herself and with those around her. She was true to her Midwest roots, loving pickles, polka, a good kringle, twizzlers, and hoppy IPAs.

She was an avid reader of the news and literature. She loved her Milwaukee Brewers and Northwestern Wildcats and adopted the Giants. A gifted writer and editor, teacher and accountability coach; she helped countless people tell their stories of how they have transformed their world. Children and young adults with disabilities held a special place in her heart. As a cancer survivor, she was devoted to the study of lymphoma, participating in studies and seminars to further this field of research. 

Susan’s family is eternally grateful for the outpouring of love and support during her cancer treatment and at her sudden death on November 8th. She passed away blanketed in the love of both family and friends from around the world and from our local community.

Small private services will be held to remember this beautiful woman. To honor her, please consider a donation to the things she cared deeply about, such as the Sempervirens Fund to protect the redwood forests in Santa Cruz, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to support those with blood cancers, Camp Kesem that provides support to kids and families impacted by cancer, or the charity of your choice. Susan truly lived a life for others and calls us to do the same.

Published by San Francisco Chronicle from Nov. 11 to Nov. 14, 2021.

 

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1980s Featured Legacies Featured Legacies Home Legacies Uncategorized

Marshall Sella (MSJ88)

The Funny Man
by John Rasmus

Reprinted from Outside Magazine article published Jan. 11, 2022

Marshall Sella started as an intern at Outside in Chicago in 1988, and he went on to a successful career as a magazine writer in New York. His friends and former colleagues will remember him as much for his infectious humor and generous spirit. Here, his editor recalls the impact a young man had on a magazine still finding its voice.

Late one afternoon in the Chicago offices of Outside, I detected some consternation from down the hall, a glitch in the matrix. It was June 1990, and the new issue had just arrived. Marshall Sella, one of our junior editors, came to the door, clearly the designated bearer of bad news. None of the senior editors were going to take responsibility for this one.

“J.R.,” he said, “I’ve got something unfortunate to tell you.” In one of our recent travel packages, he reminded me, we’d published a photo of Earth taken from space, and somehow it had been reversed, making the enormous island nation of Madagascar appear to be off the west coast of Africa—which, of course, it is not. Embarrassing enough.

We’d printed a clever but tortured correction, but now, two months later, someone had noticed that we—i.e., Marshall—had apologized for “showing Madagascar to the east of Africa,” which is where, in fact, Madagascar is. So, we’d botched the photo, then botched the correction, and now we’d have to own up to that, too. In my mind, that would be three tainted issues we couldn’t submit for the National Magazine Awards, at least not for, you know, General Excellence. A steep price for “clever.”

Marshall gamely attempted to explain the unforced error. It had something to do with confusing the east coast of Africa and the west coast of Madagascar, I don’t remember the details, but I do recall his fascinating combination of candor, self-pity, remorse, growing acceptance, and … suddenly, redemption. His face brightened.

“Or maybe,” he offered, “we didn’t really get it wrong. Madagascar is to the east of Africa! Maybe we don’t need to apologize for the apology we didn’t need to make!” This, at least, was the kernel of a reason not to do anything, which I liked. But now he was thinking bigger—about how he could turn this insight into an even more clever meta correction. “Let me see what I can do,” he said, and scooted back to his office.

Marshall Sella, who died unexpectedly in December at 60, still so young, was as responsible as anyone for shaping the Chicago-era vibe of Outside. Founder Lorenzo Burke was the fearless captain of our ship. Brash storytellers like Tim Cahill, writer-adventurers like David Roberts, literary hotshots like David Quammen and his Montana neighbor E. Jean Carroll—they set the bar early and high. But the supporting cast, the editorial crew—younger, less experienced, and, as it turned out, extremely talented—helped shape Outside’s personality and its voice, and nobody more than Marshall. That voice was warm but sly, smart, and never cliquish. If there was a joke involved (and there usually was), you, the reader, were in on it.

Marshall joined us in 1988 as a grad school intern from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, making an impression in his Eastern European military coat and English walking boots. But he was also the midwestern kid from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, who’d had the lead part in a Milwaukee Players production of Sherlock Holmes. (Maybe that’s where he got those walking boots.) He’d even sung a bit. In any case, he came ready to entertain, in print and around the office.

In those days all the editors, myself included, were works in progress, feeling a bit disconnected from the great outdoor world we covered from our urban outpost at Clark and Division. We had high aspirations for the magazine, we didn’t always meet them, and office life could get a little stressful. I shamefully cop to the label of being “demanding,” at times perhaps borderline insufferable. In any case, we needed all the fake-it-till-you-make-it energy and bravado we could muster, which Marshall supplied, every day, with his warm smirk, his sophisticated, Spy-influenced style, and his near hourly outbursts of laughter that I could hear from my desk.

After graduating, he came on full time and started editing product and travel packages and sidebars, cooking up quizzes, and writing house copy. You could discern his hand in everything from the table of contents to the back page Parting Shot. He worked his captions and short intros to insane, often hilarious precision. It’s easy to see how, by the tenth draft of that Madagascar correction, he’d have utterly confused himself.

Marshall’s office banter was so sharp and came so fast that “he raised everybody’s game just trying to keep up with him,” remembers his fellow intern and future author Dan Coyle. “He had an ability to make other people their funniest, happiest selves.”

A few days ago, more than a dozen of his colleagues got together on a Google call to remember Marshall, and I learned a few new things. He gave fellow editors nicknames like Cashew Head and performed droll impressions of our managing editor, Mark Bryant, and the actor James Mason—if Mason were a slowly sizzling piece of bacon. He claimed that Robert De Niro, with every movie he appeared in, always had a scene where he stomped on someone’s head. He would imitate that, too, with gusto. On the other hand, Marshall’s was the office you went to when you needed to have a little cry.

When Rob Story, a prominent ski writer and another intern from the early days, got married in Telluride, Colorado, Marshall was one of his groomsmen. Dressed in his tuxedo on the big day, and sensing the absurdity of his attire in the Old West mining town, Rob remembers, Marshall went up to the hotel clerk and asked, “Could you tell me if there’s a nice clean hiking trail nearby?”

He was the brother—younger, older, it didn’t matter—we were drawn to and, honestly, adored. By definition, then, we were kind of a family, and he was the star.

“I think everyone had a crush on him,” his friend and colleague Laura Hohnhold said. “All of us.”

Marshall left Outside in 1991 to be a full-time freelancer, then moved to New York in 1993. He slowly became a gravitational force again, writing for New York, GQ, Premiere, Elle, The New York Times Magazine. His friend Will Dana, the former editor of Rolling Stone, recalls him attracting crowds of both sexes at downtown writers’ parties. The staff at Outside, which moved to Santa Fe in 1994, were thrilled when he covered the national cheerleading championships for the first issue of Women Outside.

Marshall’s superpower, everyone seems to agree, was his ability to fiercely connect with and observe people, capture their quirks and tells, and shape those insights into powerful stories, even with only scraps to work with. His moving Times Magazine article “Missing,” published just weeks after 9/11, told the stories of victims through the flyers their loved ones posted all over the city. He profiled Sister Wendy, a British nun and art historian turned wildly popular PBS star, and was one of the very first to capture the populist essence and power of a new media outlet called Fox News. Its boss, the notorious Roger Ailes, was “a pugnacious and jokey man,” Marshall wrote. “His pale blue eyes regard you suspiciously until you’ve spent a lot of time together, and half-suspiciously after that.”

Mark Adams, an old friend and author himself, admired Marshall’s ability to drop himself into stories—subtly and unobtrusively, but to important effect. Not only was he connecting and explaining his subject, but he turned and connected to you, revealing himself along the way. Adams points to Marshall’s 2013 story for GQ about the disgraced New York pol Anthony Weiner.

“Writing a true profile is a genuinely weird endeavor,” Marshall confesses in the middle of that piece. “It’s like being in love without the love: You want to know every little thing about the subject. You will follow them anywhere, always wondering what they’re thinking or why they move their hands like that. You think about them when they are not around. During the reporting phase, if you’re any good at what you do, you’re a little bit insane. But you get time to cool off later: take the real measure, look at the experience from a distance.”

That superpower, like superpowers do, also cost him. His older sister, Claire Meyer, remembers watching a post-9/11 episode of Ric Burns’s PBS series on New York City, which included a brief clip of Marshall reporting “Missing.” “He’s holding one of those flyers, looking at the photo of a victim,” she says, “absorbing the loss not only of an individual, but in its totality.” She remembers watching her brother put his hands to his face, stricken.

By the early 2000s, Marshall had more magazine work than he could handle. According to Dana, “Every editor he worked with wanted to work with him again.” Each piece needed to be perfect and on time, and he expected his editors to get what he was trying to do. Later in his career, his friends say, he’d decide if he wanted to work with someone based on whether he thought they’d cut his jokes.

Marshall’s only thwarted ambition, Adams and others say, was to become a successful humorist, a Will Rogers type or a comedy writer for Letterman. That combination of high-wire wit and a big stage would have been worthy of his talents. He had to settle for being one of the best magazine writers of his generation.

Finally, he was also a great and thoughtful friend. Adams, an early riser, would get morning texts from night-owl Marshall wrapping up his workday at 5 a.m. Long before Facebook, Adams remembers, “Marshall would find out your birthday and call or send you an email every year.” He was close to his family back in Milwaukee—“he was the coolest uncle in the world, my role model,” his nephew, John Mörk, told me—and kept in touch with his Outside family. We all got one of those birthday greetings every year.

One of the nice things about being around for the early days of a magazine, or any organization, is that you have a chance to set a tone, a sensibility. If it works, it can carry on, like a regional accent, for generations. Reading Outside today, I hear Marshall’s voice still coming through from a group of smart, young, ambitious editors and writers who were likely toddlers when Marshall was crafting that sound, testing it, taking it to the next level.

Not long before he left Outside and Chicago, Marshall wrote what turned out to be a fitting send-off, for the magazine’s 15th anniversary issue. Titled “Atlas Shrugged,” the short piece captured our early days perfectly: self-aware, not afraid to fail, ready to delight.

“Magazine editing, like faith and seismic shifts, can move mountains,” he wrote. “And over the years, Outside has moved a few of them—not to mention the odd rainforest, country, and ocean.” His piece recounted the magazine’s most boneheaded location muffs and, in a final meta touch, named his Madagascar double doink “Outside’s most ambitious gaffe of all time.”

“No one is fired for the incident,” he wrote about that day in my office, “though the man responsible for the ‘correction’ is later forced to write an article about geographic errors for Outside’s 15th anniversary issue.”

Well done, Marshall.