Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Sylvia Plath died in 1963, Ida B. Wells in 1931, Alan Turing in 1954. These are all names we know today, but when they died, they did not receive an obituary in the paper of record, The New York Times. Since it first began publishing in 1851, the paper has published thousands of obits, but like American culture as a whole, it tended to prioritize the accomplishments of men, mostly white men. Now, for the past five years, the modern-day staff at The Times has been on a bit of a course correction.

The project is called Overlooked, and it was launched in 2018. The paper featured obituaries of those who had gone unheralded for their lives and their works, and now those pieces plus more in a book. Amisha Amy Padnani is an Editor of The Times Obituary's Desk and creator of Overlooked. She's also the co-author of the new book, Overlooked: A Celebration of Remarkable, Underappreciated People Who Broke the Rules and Changed the World. It contains 66 obituaries. About two dozen of them have not previously been published. Amy, welcome back to WNYC. You came on the show when Overlooked first launched, so it's nice to see you and nice to see you with this big accomplishment.

Amisha Padnani: Oh, thank you so much. It's so lovely to be back.

Alison Stewart: For those who aren't familiar with the project, now book. How do you describe Overlooked to people?

Amisha Padnani: Well, you gave it a great description, but for me, it was a personal mission. When I started on the Obituary's Desk, it was early 2017, and I noticed we would get these emails from readers occasionally saying, "Hey, why don't you have more women and people of color in your obituary pages?" I thought, "Yes, why don't we?" I was on my own personal mission, thinking about diversity, thinking about my own voice and perspective, and why it mattered in the newsroom. I really wanted to get at an answer of how we could balance our report.

I started mulling over this question. I talked with some colleagues. Together, we came up with this great idea to revisit history and write the obituaries of people that this section had left out.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like to get you in on this conversation. Whose life do you think we need to know more about? Who's been overlooked? Who do you think merits an obituary in The New York Times that maybe didn't get one? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in and join us on air, or you can text to us at that number. We know you're history nerds like us, and you have opinions.

212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or maybe you have a question for Amy Padnani about the process of revisiting history and how they go about memorializing people. 212-433-9692. We're looking for overlooked people who you'd like to add to the list. When it first launched, it focused on remarkable women from history, and it now includes men. When and why the change?

Amisha Padnani: I always had in my mind that I think they were worthy of inclusion. I am the daughter of Indian immigrants myself. I see how hard immigrants work when they arrive in this country. I myself was taught to put my head down, blend in, assimilate, and quite frankly, not really brag about my accomplishments or successes. I feel like there's so many people out there who were in that same boat. You go about living life, doing remarkable things, and not necessarily talking about them.

I just thought that there were so many important Black men, immigrants, men of color in general, who had something to contribute to this overall arc in this project. We also opened it up to include people from the LGBTQ community, as well as people with disabilities.

Alison Stewart: You write in Overlooked that obituaries are landmines for potentially incorrect facts. How do you go about corroborating facts for people who've been dead for decades?

Amisha Padnani: Oh, my gosh. It's one of the trickiest parts. I've actually heard from journalists, long-time career journalists, who have said that this was one of the most difficult assignments they have ever had. In part because the research and the fact-checking is so intensive. Sometimes we're fortunate to have a living descendant that we can talk to. Other times somebody has neatly packaged a person's life in a biography for us or a documentary that's been helpful but other times there's virtually nothing out there, and so we have to get really creative at times.

Looking back at newspapers, like The Afro-American, who would've valued somebody's life and written about it in their day while other mainstream media did not, has been extremely useful. There are census records, death records, and so we just sort of piece everything together like a puzzle but sure, there are times where someone was the first or the best, the fastest, and hedging as our friend, believed to be the first, widely considered the best. We make use of those phrases as often as possible.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Lucy calling in from Hackensack on Line 1. Hi, Lucy. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Lucy: Oh, hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. I knew one of the people that was highlighted in this group of people. I was reading The New York Times one day, and I'm going through it and there is Omero Catan, who was Mr. First. He lived in Teaneck, New Jersey, and he lived next door to me. I lived next door to him for years and years, and he had a sign saying that he was Mr. First on his door. I had no idea what this was. I was about five years old when we moved into Teaneck. I got friendly with his daughter, and she said, "Oh, he goes across bridges and all kinds of things and he's the first one."

I was a kid and it was nice and I got to know him. He had also worked at some of the baseball or football stadiums. I remember he had all the football baseball cards. I met his wife. Again, I knew his daughter for years. I also believe that he wrote a book. He did shuffleboarding. My father at the time worked for the New York Times and he asked my father if he might get a plugin for shuffleboarding because that was his favorite thing. I was so shocked. The picture was wonderful of him and it was just a wonderful surprise.

Alison Stewart: Oh, Lucy, you sounded like it was a great thing to see and discover. We've got a text that says, "Thank you NYT for Overlooked No More. As a regular reader of obituaries for historical purposes, I greatly appreciate the educational value." Which brings me to my question of, what's important to include? What are some of the details that you know you want to include in these obituaries?

Amisha Padnani: When I look back at these stories as a whole, I feel like there's this common theme of struggle. Pretty much everybody in this book has overcome something really major. What comes away for me is the story, not just of overcoming those struggles, but the layers of human complexity that came with them, some of the decisions they made, and the process. For instance, some people lied about their background.

They lied about who their parents were, they lied about their ethnicity, where they were, for instance, a Black person who may not have wanted to be associated with the history of slavery in order to be more accepted in society. I find that so fascinating because it just shows what we have to do as human beings to feel like we need to be accepted and get by in life.

Alison Stewart: Let's take another call. Let's talk to Mary Dodge. Oh, no, Kate. Oh, Kate, I gave away your person. Hi, Kate from -- [crosstalk]

Kate: Oh, they looked up the--

Alison Stewart: Sorry about that.

Kate: They looked up my guy or looked up the lady, Mary Mapes Dodge, Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skate author. From just reading the blurbs on the book, she seems like she was an investigative journalist and she was working at Ellis Island, and it just seems like during the great Ellis Island plethora of people coming through, she was just right there.

Alison Stewart: Kate, thank you so much. Sorry, I gave it away a little bit. My guest is Amy Padnani. We are talking about Overlooked: A Celebration of Remarkable, Underappreciated People Who Broke the Rules and Changed the World. It's a new book. It's part of The New York Times Overlooked Obituary series. Well, actually, the overlooked categories are capturing our imagination, paddling their own canoes, envisioning new possibilities, creating art that endures, and facing the fights. That's the way the book is organized. How did you land upon these categories?

Amisha Padnani: Sometimes it was obvious. We had a lot of people who were advocates. They spent their entire lives fighting for the greater good. Suffragists, for instance. Other times people just did things because they wanted to, and yet they ended up blazing a trail and sometimes they just did something incredibly quirky. You have absolutely no idea what compelled them to do this thing. Those are the ones that I love called, capturing the imagination. People like Annie Edson Taylor, who was the first to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive.

Others had done it, but they did not survive. It was her 60th birthday. It was a get-rich-quick scheme and she, for some reason, decided that this was the thing she wanted to do to get ahead in life.

Alison Stewart: There's another woman there called Rattlesnake Kate, born 1893, died in 1969 on page 37. What was Rattlesnake Kate's real name and how did she earn that nickname?

Amisha Padnani: Katherine McHale Slaughterback was a farmer, a really tough farmer in the rugged planes of Colorado. One day there was a duck hunt nearby and she and her three-year-old son went out on their horse to see if they could find wounded ducks to cook for dinner. On the way back, she went to open this gate and a rattlesnake came out of nowhere. Kate being who Kate is took out her rifle, which she always carried, and shot the snake. Then another one came and another one came and another, and so she grabbed whatever she could, which happened to be a sign that said no hunting, and proceeded to clobber 140 snakes to death to protect her son.

After a couple of days of bed rest, she went back, collected the skins, made a flapper-style dress out of them, and accessories. She also collected venom to help scientists with research. This older cowboy poet gentleman read about her in the newspaper, saw her photo, and said, "You're mighty Purdy," and wrote to her these beautiful poems. They exchanged letters for 40 years, but there's no evidence that they ever actually met in person.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I feel like there's a country song in there. There's got to be.

Amisha Padnani: Actually, this was pitched to me by, I'm going to botch her name, Neyla Pekarek. She was a singer with Lumineers and she has an entire solo album about Rattlesnake Kate. She even performs in a copycat dress, flapper-style dress of snake skins.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that is going to send me down a whole rabbit hole after the show. [laughs] Listeners, whose life do you think we need to know more about? Who has been overlooked? Who do you think merits an obituary in the New York Times? Give us a call, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can text to us at that number as well, or you can join us on air. We've got a text that says, very recently died within the past two weeks, Overlooked.

Cobi Narita, a Japanese-American woman who was the creator of the Universal Jazz Coalition, and a tremendous force on the New York jazz scene, a huge and vocal supporter of jazz and jazz musicians. There you go.

Amisha Padnani: Oh, excellent. Only from a couple of weeks ago, we could actually run a daily obituary. There's no reason for that person to be overlooked.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Wendy, calling in from Springfield, New Jersey. Hi, Wendy, thanks for calling All Of It.

Wendy: Hi. I hope you get rid of your cold soon. You've been doing very well.

Alison Stewart: Thanks.

Wendy: Josephine E. Jones was a Harlem activist and was covered quite extensively in The Times for her brownstone and was also probably the first Black woman in management of Fortune 500 company. She has a biography that's at the Schomburg, and she died in 2017 at the age of 97, and so disclosure, I am her daughter.

Amisha Padnani: Oh, wow.

Alison Stewart: What would you want people to know most about your mom and her accomplishments?

Wendy: Well, I lead with the corporate thing only because that attracts people's attention. To me, what was most important about my mother was that she had a loving heart that didn't just encompass me as her only child, but also her extended family, the community, the world. I call it circles of love. That I think is one of the most important things about her. The other things got her in the newspaper, but that was what I think was the most loving thing about her, the wonderful thing about her.

Alison Stewart: I'm so glad you added that. Wendy, thank you for calling in. Let's talk about someone from the category of facing the fight. It's a comedian named Stella Young. We have a clip of Stella, but tell us a little bit about her.

Amisha Padnani: Sure. She was an Australian comedian. She used a wheelchair. She was one day approached by a man in the neighborhood who wanted to give her a community award, and her parents said "For doing what?” She was just a student who hung out in her room. She really didn't do anything according to her. This person said, “Oh, because life is so hard for you, and you managed to navigate it remarkably." They realized they were referring to her disability. Stella said, "What? No, we are just who we are. We are not meant to be your objects of inspiration."

She coined this term inspiration porn, which is now taught in media, in various organizations, the National Center for Disability and Journalism, for instance, as a way to prevent people from writing these charity articles. Let's listen to a little bit of a TED Talk that Stella Young gave in Sydney, Australia.

Stella Young: For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers, or our doctors, or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire. In fact, I'm sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably expecting me to inspire you. [laughter] Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. I'm not here to inspire you. I'm here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. We've been sold the lie that disability is a bad thing. Capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing. To live with disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing and it doesn't make you exceptional.

Alison Stewart: That is from Stella Young's Ted Talk from 2014. What kind of decisions did the editors make in editing these obituaries? We noticed that in Sylvia Plath's, it doesn't mention her husband until the fifth paragraph.

Amisha Padnani: I find that extremely important. When we ran stories about her in the New York Times, she was often referred to as the wife of Ted Hughes. A lot of times I see this even today as an editor of obituaries. We'll see credit given to a man really high up or description of this woman trying to struggle in a man's world, and I'm thinking, “Well, what did she do though?” It turns out this woman would've done something amazing. In my opinion, the top of the obituary should be talking about her accomplishments, not necessarily being in a man's world and the struggle.

Sure, that's important, but first and foremost, readers want to know why do I care about this person? What did they do? How did they change the world? That's front of mind for me as an editor.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jim from Teaneck, New Jersey. Hi, Jim. Thanks for calling all of it.

Jim: Well, thanks for taking my call. I love this show. Thank you. I would like to suggest an overlooked obituary of a woman named Margaret E. Knight, who lived from 1838 to 1914. In 1868, she invented a machine that would cut, fold, and paste the flat-bottom paper bag. She revolutionized retail merchandising by doing that. No sooner did she invent that machine and start using it, and some guy came along and said, "No, I invented it and I deserve the patent. She couldn't possibly have invented it because she's a woman and she wouldn't possibly have the intuitive knowledge necessary to invent such a machine.'' She did prevail in that fight.

Alison Stewart: I love your passion, Jim. Thank you for calling in.

Amisha Padnani: One of the most interesting emails I received after Overlooked launched in 2018 was from somebody in the US Patent Office who provided me a list of names of women whose patents were provided in their husband's names because, at some point, it apparently wasn't allowed for a woman to apply for a patent. I am familiar with Margaret E. Knight. She is on my list for consideration, and I really appreciate hearing all those details.

Alison Stewart: I have to be honest, I Twitter bullied the New York Times into an obit once.

Amisha Padnani: Did it work?

Alison Stewart: It did. It did. It was for a former Tuskegee Airman, Dr. Roscoe C. Brown, and he was the president of Bronx Community Center and Community College. He had a TV show. I believe he got a gold medal. I think he saved Norman Lear's life in World War II. He was a -- [crosstalk]

Amisha Pandnani: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I did the Do Better thing. I'm a little embarrassed to say it out loud, but I felt strongly about it.

Amisha Padnani: We're a ragtag team, a really small team.

Alison Stewart: That's the other part. I was like, "Oh, it's a small team." Still, I was like, "Oh, this person's amazing. You need to write this."

Amisha Padnani: Well, we need to be made aware of these stories, which is part of the reason that Overlooked was created. Every morning I sit with my colleagues in a room and we look over a list of people who have died and so many of them are men and a lot of them are white men. I want to hear from people more day to day about people in their communities who die. That's really where we need to make change.

Alison Stewart: What is one Overlooked obituary you'd really like people to sit with?

Amisha Padnani: So many. Terri Rogers has become a new favorite for me, transgender ventriloquist. Her YouTube clips are just hilarious. She was really an expert at what she did. There are people quoted in there who said, “These are the top three things of ventriloquist needs to do.” She had this fourth ability, and so she had this great range of voice. Just really excellent in what she did. She was authentically herself, even as she wasn't fully embraced for being transgender. I think that there are a lot of emotions that come up when reading her story.

Alison Stewart: Overlooked: A Celebration of Remarkable, Underappreciated People Who Broke the Rules and Changed the World. It's a beautiful book. Amy Padnani, thank you so much for the work you do and for this.

Amisha Padnani: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: We're going to go out on the song, The Attack about Rattlesnake Kate from Neyla Pekarek.

Rattlesnake Kate, known Kate Slaughterback

Got her nickname when she was looking for ducks and then a rattlesnake attacked

She saw just one snake, then two, then ten

Pulled out a 22 rifle and the massacre began

Before too long she had no bullets left

Grabbed a sign right out of the ground and clobbered them to death

Ahhh.

 

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