In my editorial page days, I enjoyed the occasional opportunity to write a remembrance of the great and good, and sometimes the vile and villainous. For Dr. Seuss I wrote a memorial piece in his own rhyming style, which was fun and greatly enhanced by an art department contribution of a weeping Cat in the Hat.
I also admit to a special fondness for an editorial on the death of the 37th President beginning as follows: “Richard Nixon spent the last twenty years of his life trying to keep Watergate out of the first sentence of his obituary. He failed.”
But today I come to ignore the ignominious, not to prang them. Instead, I’d like to pay homage to the lives of several interesting and admirable men who died in recent days.
Roger Bannister was a seventeen-year-old Oxford student when he first put on spikes to run on a track. As an undergraduate and then as a medical student he competed in races and was invited to join the British team at the 1948 Olympics. He declined, feeling he was not ready for competition on that level. By 1952, however, he was winning 1500-meter and mile races and competed in the Helsinki games.
He continued to train, though he was now a young doctor, and in 1954 at a meet at Oxford became he first man to run a mile in under four minutes, a mark which seemed as elusive as the sound barrier. The record stood for a mere 46 days, but Bannister became a national hero in an austere postwar England in need of them.
He was also a model of the amateur sportsman, in an era before everything, including the Olympics, was professionalized. After the mile record, he more of less hung up his spikes and went on to a distinguished career as a neurologist with over 80 scientific papers to his credit. He died at 88.
Speaking of Brits and science, Stephen Hawking died of a rare form of ALS at the age of 76, about fifty years older than his doctors predicted when he was diagnosed. Though eventually rendered mute and immobile by the disease, his mind could still encompass the cosmos, and technology allowed him to communicate, to collaborate with fellow scientists, tutor postgraduates, and write a best-selling book that probably befuddled a majority of his readers.
For the layman, Einsteinium space-time, was just about graspable, quantum mechanics bordering on voodoo and the stuff in which Hawking trafficked otherworldly — gravitational physics, black holes, event horizons, singularities, cosmological inflation. Without the math, you can only bow down as before a demigod whose claims you must take on faith.
His ideas impressed his peers sufficiently for him to win endless awards, though he also engaged in lively disagreements and wagers. His obvious enjoyment of his celebrity was charming, as he lent his attention to such things as children’s’ books written with his daughter, cameos on “The Big Bang Theory,” and warnings about the threat to humankind from alien encounters, nuclear arms, climate change and AI.
In his last paper he described a universe fading to black as it ran down. The same process of entropy finally overcame him, but his memory will survive as he will be interred in Westminster near the graves of Newton and Darwin.
Another kind of timelessness was represented by the couture of Hubert Givenchy. He was the least faddish of designers, preferring elegance of line to rococo extravagance. Most of us do not travel in the circles where we might encounter a woman wearing his simple, elegant and flattering clothes. They included an English Duchess, German Baroness, Italian Countess, as well as Rothschilds and Whitneys.
Yet we have all seen his clothes since he also dressed Jacquline Kennedy, Grace Kelly and, his ideal model, Audrey Hepburn in “Sabrina,” “Funny Face,” “Love in the Afternoon,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and “Charade.” Here was art as sublime as any sculpture or painting on the wall. Givenchy was 91 at his death in his chateau in the Loire.
Last, but far from least, T. Berry Brazelton also died this month at the age of 90. For my mother’s generation, the go-to guide for coping with the mysteries of parenthood was Dr. Spock. For mine, it was Brazelton, a Texas pediatrician whose television program, “What Every Baby Knows” and newspaper column performed the invaluable function of allowing freaked out parents to calm down and enjoy their baby’s development.
He was a soothing, non-judgmental, engaging presence. Interestingly, he admitted that he always loved babies, but at first found it hard to be as cozy with their parents, probably because his own mother had made it plain that she preferred his brother and treated him in a cold and distant manner, as if he was as an unwelcome intruder.
Of course, he eventually made it part of his life’s work to encourage countless mothers and fathers not to do that. He was a lovely man who authored 200 papers and two dozen books, but seeing was believing. Watching him on TV interacting with babies with patience, calm, and understanding made him an inspiration and role model for millions of anxious parents.
We spend too much time on people whose fame is based on egotistical preening, exhibitionism, greed, seeking and abusing power. Yet the world progresses and is worth inhabiting because of more admirable characters.
An amateur athlete who set records but thereafter spent a life of service and medical research. A genius with a debilitating disease of the body that didn’t prevent his mind from ranging widely and, even more impressively perhaps, preserving a sense of humor. An artist whose medium was cloth and canvas the human form and whose works were a glimpse of the ideal. A baby doctor who conveyed the happy news that these wee creatures are overflowing wth humanity, possibility, and capable of miraculous breakthroughs on a daily basis.
Bless all who run the race of life for the joy of competing, for the thrill of discovery, the quest for beauty, or the gift of understanding.