Tag: obituary

Gene Glazer

Gene Glazer, a former resident of Kendall Park and fellow-traveler politically, died earlier this week. His son Barry, a friend from college, said he continued the political fight until the end.

Here is a snippet of his e-mail to me:

He published his last letter to the editor last month and was planning on attending the National Veterans For Peace conference in St.Louis next week. He continued to write to local media expressing his concerns about the war in Iraq and a myriad of other social issues. He was certainly a man of conscience, of conviction, and most importantly of action. He passed peacefully in the company of family with an Impeach Bush/Cheney button on his hospital gown.

That certainly sounds like Gene. We need to keep up the good fight in his honor.

I’ll have a column in Thursday’s South Brunswick Post on Gene and I’ll try to pass along an obit and information on memorial services when I get it.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Thoughts on Ruth Spataro

Ruth Spataro helped keep South Brunswick sane.

That’s probably the most accurate statement I can make about a woman I knew for 17 years.

Ruth, who died on Sunday, was both an old-school woman-behind-the-man and a force in her own right, a school teacher and administrator at a time when the township began to undergo major changes, a woman who was a serious advocate for a town in which she spent her entire life.

Ruth kept tabs on South Brunswick schools, correctly predicting the enrollment increases that were to come and pushign the district to craft building plans that accounted for the growth. That sometimes meant larger projects and bigger price tags, but she knew taxpayers were going to have to pay one way or the other.

In many ways, she is the reason the district did so well in dealing with growth.

One thing that always struck me about Ruth was the way she would let others make her case — whether they be her husband, Joe Spataro, or advocates like Lew Schwartz, Frank Chrinko and others. Ruth would do the work, would sit with officials, but when it came time for meetings, she would remain a regal and quiet presence in the council room.

She was a remarkable woman who will be missed.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Brief thoughts on Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday, silencing a champion of humanistic values and a critical intelligence who was never afraid to pole a stick at the grizzly bears who hold power in this country.

Vonnegut was a hard writer to characterize. Ostensibly a science fiction writer, he was far more — a caustic social critic, a religious skeptic, a humorist.

He was, as the novelist Norman Mailer said in a statement (published in the Associated Press story to which I’v e linked above), ”a marvelous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own. … I would salute him — our own Mark Twain.”

While “Slaughterhouse Five” gets most of the ink, my favorite novel of his is “Mother Night” (it’s the least sci-fi of the bunch). It a book that challenges our easy conceptions of the world — an alleged Nazi spy is on trial in Israel, but we made to consider his actions and question his guilt. It is one of those rare books that forces you to read it cover to cover in a sitting, but challenges you, drags you into questions you might not wish to ask leading to answers you might not wish you’d learned.

I’ll close this with a comment from The Washington Post’s the Achenblog:

Why did we love him so?

Because Kurt Vonnegut told us the truth about living in a world gone mad. And he somehow made us laugh along the way. That’s winning the perfecta.

Yes, it is.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.