Passed Made Present

Leonard Zakim

“Mr. Zakim started a black-Jewish Passover seder in the early 1980’s as relations between the two groups deteriorated. Six people showed up… This year, 650 attended.”

If you spend any time driving in Boston, you learn certain names by rote, e.g. Sumner, Callahan, Tobin, or Logan. But if you’re like me, you can’t identify these transportation namesakes without looking them up. (OK, fine, Ted Williams. But you see my point.)

I drive over the Zakim Bridge at least eight times a week. I hadn’t known for whom it was named until I received this suggestion: “Kids today should learn about Lenny.”

Zakim’s New York Times obituary describes a man who made a life of uniting people for good.

It offers the vocabulary words anti-Semitism, defamation, and bigotry; more happily, tolerance and reconciliation as well.

Middle school students learn about metaphors as literary devices. By reading Zakim’s obituary they see how this bridge is a fitting metaphorical, and literal, tribute.

Samantha Sadd

One man “drove so far, from God knows where, just to tell me how she turned his life around… And he kept saying, ‘She got me to ski.'”

Samantha Sadd taught generations of children “about the city and beyond” with field trips, subway rides, and salad-making lessons. She led the Hawthorne Youth and Community Center, which several of my students frequent.

Sadd was not the surname she was born with; she declined to offer explanations for the change. My students came up with their own theories, including this one, which I think is pretty good: “Maybe she wanted to take in all the sadness and give out happiness.”

They also came up with their own allegorical surnames, including this one, which I think is unimprovable: Nate Reflex.

Ms. Sadd’s Boston Globe obituary describes a remarkable and admirable woman, the sort for whom the designation “pillar of the community” is exactly suitable. This teacher also likes her obituary because it demonstrates why background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension. For example, a 6th grader might understand each of the following words, yet risk alarmed confusion: “[S]he was a whiz at handicapping racehorses,” her sister said.

Mark Fidrych

It was rough becoming a Red Sox fan in the 1980s. I sought solace in literature, namely baseball biographies. That’s how I learned of Mark Fidrych.

Even to a child it was obvious that Fidrych was singular. But it was by reading posthumous tribute that I learned how much so: writer Paul Auster calls Fidrych “perhaps the most lovable person ever to play the game.”

If you don’t know much about him, read some of the pieces here (don’t neglect Joe McNally’s).

Fidrych’s pitching arm was prematurely damaged, but his graciousness and cheer remained unscathed:

“What I got out of baseball is what I have today, and I’ve got to look at that… I got a great life now,” he said, sitting in his living room. “I got a family, I got a house, I got a dog. I would like my career to have been longer, but you can’t look back. You have to look to the future.”

Carney Lansford, a former Red Sox third baseman (I can still recite the 1982 lineup) eulogized him well:

“I don’t think you’ll ever see someone like that come around again… He was just great for the game. That’s what the game needed, more guys like him.”

There isn’t a game around that doesn’t need more guys like Mark Fidrych.

Alex

“You be good,” said Alex. “I love you.”

Alex, who found a home at Brandeis University, also claimed a perch on some of the more exclusive real estate in print: the obituary page of the Economist. “Science’s best known parrot,” they called him. Today my 6th graders read another one of his many obituaries.

Lest this sound like a belated April Fools joke, let me assure you that Alex was a real, and indeed rare, bird. He had the intelligence of a (human) five-year-old and a vocabulary of over one hundred words. According to his Wikipedia entry, “[h]e was the first and only non-human animal to have ever asked an existential question.” His death at age thirty-one was especially tragic: the typical African Grey parrot’s lifespan is twice that.

We read Alex’s obituary on the final day of the new state English tests, which take 225 minutes over three days. I expect my students have his sympathy: “After repeating some learning trials dozens of times, Alex would become tired and throw objects off the trays with his beak.”

Kip Tiernan

Kip Tiernan founded America’s first homeless shelter for women. She named it Rosie’s Place, believing everyone needs a rose.

Mary Moon Wilson taught my students maternal, Edward Walsh and Michael Kennedy taught us fraternal, and with Ms. Tiernan’s obituary we learned sorority. Her purview, however, was humanity: she also helped found the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, the Greater Boston Food Bank, and Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission.

“The lives she saved were untold,” Mayor Tom Menino said.