Swimming With Sharks

Many years ago, I applied for a job as an obituary writer for the Chicago Tribune.

I was sharing this news with my oldest brother, who was living in California at the time with his wife and daughter. (They have since moved to Colorado.)

My niece, Victoria, who was about 8 years old at the time, and, who, of course, was listening to in on the speaker, was appalled at the idea of my potential gig.

"Writing about people who died?" she said, leaning heavy on the melodrama. "How tragic!"

Writing about people who died, as she put it, may sound morbid, but the obit section is the most-read section of any newspaper.

As my editor at the Pocono Record once told me, “Most people only get their names in the newspaper twice in their lives: when they’re born and when they die.”

I read the New York Times obit page every day--and not just for the famous names, but I also check out the lesser known individuals.

A well-written obituary goes beyond one person's life story to provide history lesson of a certain time and place. And a successful person's obit can be inspirtional and even instructional as you learn what steps they took to make it big.

I was going through my massive stack of old newspapers last week when I came across two intriguing obits that appeared on the very same page.

I didn't recognize their names, but I knew their work instantly and both articles brought back so many memories.

The first was for Ralph Lee, a puppeteer who created masks and figures for the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York City Opera, and was recognized as the "father" of the Village Halloween Parade back 1974.

And in addition to that, Lee, who died at at age 87, also created the Land Shark puppet that first appeared on "Saturday Night Live" in 1975 and mocked Jaws, which was the movie event of the year back then.

You Can Call Me 'Ray'...

Billed as "Jaws 2", the sketches starred a shark that got its victims to open their doors with such lame excuses as "Candygram."

“Land shark—the cleverest species of them all!” John Belushi declares in full Richard Dreyfuss mode.

“People still know about that shark,” Lee said in a 2003 interview. “For many people, it is my claim to fame. When I was making it, I thought it would get used once and shucked.”

Just below the Ralph Lee story was an obit for a comedian named Bill Saluga, who was 85 years old at the time of his death.

Saluga had created a character named Raymond Johnson Jr., who wore a zoot suit, puffed a big cigar and had a long-winded response when asked for his name.

“Ohhhh, you doesn’t have to call me Johnson,” he'd say. “My name is Raymond J. Johnson Jr. Now, you can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, or you can call me Johnny, or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me Junie, or you can call me Ray Jay, or you can call me R.J. Or you can call me R.J.J. Or you can call me R.J.J. Jr. But you doesn’t have to call me Johnson.”

The bit probably hasn't aged well, but back in 1979, this "comedic one-hit wonder", as it was described, went viral, only in those days we only used "viral" in relation to diseases.

Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote that “now everybody and his brother are doing Saluga impressions throughout this very impressionable land of ours.”

Saluga portrayed the character in a beer commerical with Norm Crosby, who implored a patron not to ask the guy's name. But it was too late.

"My name is Raymond J. Johnson Jr. Now, you can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay…”

Saluga did regular acting jobs, the Times reported, including portraying a hostile ticket taker at an opera house in a 1992 episode of “Seinfeld” and Louis Lewis, the comedian Richard Lewis’s fictional cousin, in three episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2005.

And he didn’t mind being known primarily as Raymond J. Johnson.

“I would sit in restaurants and hear the people behind me in the booth talking about me, and I was right there,” he said in 2017. “They didn’t know who I was, which was great.”

I didn't get the Tribune obit writer job, which was a long shot, at best. But I'm still reading the obits page and taking in all these incredible stories.