ROBERT MC G. THOMAS JR., 60,
CHRONICLER OF UNSUNG LIVES
By Michael T. Kaufman
The cause was abdominal cancer, said his wife, Joan.
Mr. Thomas began writing obituaries full time in 1995 after serving as a police reporter, a rewrite man, a society news reporter and a sports writer. He developed a fresh approach to the genre, looking for telling details to illuminate lives that might otherwise have been overlooked or underreported.
Mr. Thomas saw himself as the sympathetic stranger at the wake listening to the friends and survivors of the deceased, alert for the moment when one of them would tell a memorable tale that could never have made its way into Who’s Who or a rÈsumÈ but that just happened to define a life.
In 1995, when The Times proposed him for a Pulitzer Prize in the category of spot news, the nomination began: “Every week, readers write to The New York Times to say they were moved to tears or laughter by an obituary of someone they hadn’t known until that morning’s paper. Invariably, the obituary is the work of Robert McG. Thomas Jr., who hadn’t known the subject, either, until the assignment landed on his desk a few hours before deadline.”
The gallery of portraits that Mr. Thomas compiled covered an impressive range. Among them were Howard C. Fox, “the Chicago clothier and sometime big-band trumpeter who claimed credit for creating and naming the zoot suit with the reet pleat, the reave sleeve, the ripe stripe, the stuff cuff and the drape shape that was the stage rage during the boogie-woogie rhyme time of the early 1940’s,” and Russell Colley, a mechanical engineer who became “the Calvin Klein of space” and was known to a generation of astronauts as the “father of the space suit.” There were Rose Hamburger, a 105-year-old racing handicapper;Marion Tinsley, a checker champion unbeaten by man or machine, and a vivacious woman who started out as a showgirl and ended up a princess (“Honeychile Wilder is dead, and if the ‘21’ Club is not in actual mourning, it is because the venerable former speakeasy on West 52 nd Street was closed for vacation last week when word got around that one of its most memorable former patrons had died on Aug. 11 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center”).
Mr. Thomas, a tall man with wavy hair who spoke in a voice soft with traces of his native Tennessee, was an extremely gregarious and social man. Last week he officiated at the annual New Year’s Eve party he first started giving at the family home in Shelbyville 32 years ago. About 5 percent of the town’s 12,000 people attended, and Mr. Thomas, wearing a blue silk shirt with embroidered sun and moon that he bought for the occasion, cheered his guests and the new century. As in past years, he expressed hopes that the fireworks he had ordered would not set fire to the Presbyterian church across the road.
He was fond of writing about people who became legendary as a result of a single exploit, like Douglas Corrigan, who took off from New York in a tiny overloaded plane bound for California (he said) in 1938 and landed in Dublin some 28 hours later. He became an instant hero, forever to be known as Wrong Way Corrigan, but in his obituary, Mr. Thomas went beyond recapitulation to suggest that Mr. Corrigan was more cunning than befuddled. He wrote:
“Although he continued to claim with a more or less straight face that he had simply made a wrong turn and been led astray by a faulty compass, the story was far from convincing, especially to the American aviation authorities who had rejected his repeated requests to make just such a flight because his modified 1929 Curtiss-Robin monoplane was judged unworthy.”
In a similar vein, he wrote of Johnny Sylvester, who died in 1990,64 years after he came to fame as a bedridden boy who inspired Babe Ruth. Here is how Mr. Thomas began his obituary, which was included in “The Last Word: The New York Times Book of Obituaries and Farewells” (William Morrow): “There are those who will tell you that little Johnny Sylvester was never that sick and certainly not dying. They will tell you that Babe Ruth never promised to hit a home run for him in Game 4 of the 1926 World Series, and that the three home runs that the Babe did hit in that game in no way saved the 11-year-old youngster’s life.
“Any representations to the contrary, these people will tell you, were simply embellishments of a trivial incident by an oversentimental press in a hypersentimental age.
“Such people are known as cynics.”
There was something mythic, too, about Sylvia Weinberger, Mr. Thomas wrote, “who used a sprinkling of matzoh meal, a pinch of salt and a dollop of schmaltzmanship to turn chopped liver into a commercial success.”
Robert McGill Thomas Jr. was born and grew up in Shelbyville, Tenn., where chopped liver is rare and schmaltz is not part of the vernacular. He spent his 15th year cheering for a distant relative, Senator Estes Kefauver, as Kefauver ran for vice president on the Democratic ticket with Adlai E. Stevenson. Three years later Mr. Thomas went to Yale, where he worked on the student newspaper and flunked out as a result of a decision, he said, “to major in New York rather than anything academic.”
After joining The Times as a copyboy in 1959, Mr. Thomas spent the next four decades in a variety of reporting assignments, often prowling police stations and working the phones in the late hours to produce fast-breaking stories. With his fondness for anomalies, Mr. Thomas might have described his own journalistic career as more circuitous than meteoric.
Always regarded as a stylish writer by his colleagues, he sometimes ran into career turbulence because of an acknowledged tendency to carry things like sentences, paragraphs, ideas and enthusiasms further than at least some editors preferred. Indeed, he went beyond acknowledging this trait to defending it. “Of course I go too far,” he used to say. “But unless you go too far how are you ever going to find out how far you can go?”
All of this may explain the sympathy he showed in his obituaries of underachievers and late bloomers.
There was certainly no sense of superiority in his account of the life choice made by Steven Slepack, a man who gave up a promising career in marine biology to become Professor Bendeasy, “the man in the beribboned tuxedo jacket who delighted a generation of schoolchildren by twisting balloons into animals in Central Park.” He described a character actor named Jack Weston as “the quintessential New Yorker, which is to say he was born in Cleveland and lived in Los Angeles for 18 years, hating every minute of it he wasn’t actually in front of the camera.”
In writing about Anton Rosenberg, a painter and jazz musician, Mr. Thomas said he “embodied the Greenwich Village hipster ideal of 1950’s cool to such a laid-back degree and with such determined detachment that he never amounted to much of anything.”
For some admirers, for whom Mr. Thomas’s work came to be known as “McG’s,” a favorite was his obituary of Edward Lowe, which revealed how Mr. Lowe, a sawdust merchant from Cassopolis, Mich., found a new use for some kiln-dried granulated clay he had been selling as a sop for grease spills in industrial plants and created a million-dollar market for the product he named and marketed as Kitty Litter.
Mr. Thomas provided the antecedent action to the tale in a second paragraph that established the historical significance of Mr. Lowe’s achievement: “Cats have been domesticated since ancient Egypt, but until a fateful January day in 1947, those who kept them indoors full time paid a heavy price. For all their vaunted obsession with paw-licking cleanliness, cats, whose constitutions were adapted for arid desert climes, make such an efficient use of water that they produce a highly concentrated urine that is one of the most noxious effluences of the animal kingdom. Boxes filled with sand, sawdust or wood shavings provided a measure of relief from the resulting stench, but not enough to make cats particularly welcome in discriminating homes.”
One of his admirers was Joseph Epstein, the literary essayist. “I have noted an interesting general-assignment obituary writer with the somewhat overloaded name of Robert McG. Thomas Jr., who occasionally gets beyond the facts and the rigid formula of the obit to touch on—of all things to find in The New York Times—a deeper truth,” Mr. Epstein wrote.
“Thus Thomas on one Fred Rosenstiel, ‘who spent his life planting gardens to brighten the lives of his fellow New Yorkers, and to alleviate an abiding sadness in his heart. . . .’The sadness, we learn later in the obituary, derived from Mr. Rosenstiel’s inability to ‘forgive himself for surviving the Holocaust.’A fine touch.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Thomas is survived by their twin sons, Andrew, of Lewes, Del., and David, of Manhattan; a sister, Carey Gates Thomas Hines, of Birmingham, Ala., and two grandchildren.
January 8, 2000