17 weeks ago today, my friend and fraternity brother Mike called me. I'm pretty sure I can count on one hands the number of times Mike has called me unsolicited in my entire life, so my immediate assumption was that he'd gotten a job offer or something else he wanted to confer about. I wish I'd been right. Instead, he was calling to tell me that ( Read more... )

The last cued up obituary for my vaguely morbid collection is that of Cuzin Dave Wilson, aka David Newman. The official yahrzeit for my radio colleague was September 2, but since I was on the road then I'll drop it here ( Read more... )

It doesn't feel like twelve years, but it has indeed been that long since my radio colleague Stella passed away very unexpectedly at the age of 44, which is (checks notes) the same age I am today. She was the second in a string of four active and former WRUW staff members who passed away in a short period. The others were all much older and had ( Read more... )

As I noted last year, the only person I have ever ever friended on any social media who I didn't know at least a little bit in real life was bart_calendar. Bart was a legendarily prolific writer on LiveJournal who followed pretty much anyone worth following and cranked out high quality posts with seemingly no effort at all on a wide variety of topics, most ( Read more... )

So far as I'm aware, my grandfather survived all of his first cousins. He certainly outlived the three I knew, two of whom have online obituaries. Yesterday I covered Barry; here is the obituary for his sister Annette, who I met several times. She was a nice lady who outlived all her brothers and liked dogs a lot ( Read more... )

My paternal grandfather had at least four first cousins. When I was a kid, these were known as "the cousins in Massachusetts who spelled their last name wrong." I eventually found that one of them, Calvin, was living in the Cleveland area (which is a whole other story), and through him I met his siblings Barry and Annette. The fourth cousin, ( Read more... )

Eight years ago today, a friend of mine from the WRUW staff passed away. Dr. Bill was one of the longest tenured members of the staff. He had a self-granted doctorate based on his encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and R&B in particular, and surprisingly deep knowledge in many other genres despite his avowed disinterest in most of them. Bill was also ( Read more... )

Six years ago yesterday, my friend Alex passed away on what was supposed to be the day his daughter Genevieve and I were going to host Supper Club together. Alex's birthday party in 2007 was actually the event that inspired his son-in-law to start Supper Club in the first place, so it's sort of fitting that it's more or less gone defunct since his ( Read more... )

One of the oldest, if not the oldest, member of my synagogue growing up was a woman named Dina Stern, who lived with her son Eric just a few blocks from B'nai Israel Synagogue. As a teenager, I occasionally walked her home from the synagogue after services, particularly on icy nights. As I've noted before, she was well known for handing out Andes ( Read more... )

My friend and radio colleague Roger Weist passed away three years ago today. He had both his standard obituary and the one we wrote for him on the radio website.

First, his standard obit from the Plain Dealer.
One of the most beloved members of Cleveland's Irish community, passed away on Dec. 13, 2018. Roger's tireless efforts advocating for Irish ( Read more... )