Let’s Celebrate Two Admirable Lives

2/24/2020

Two American success stories: B. Smith at her restaurant. Katherine Johnson, receiving presidential medal.

It's Black History Month in the U.S. -- time to acknowledge people who have succeeded despite the shackles of slavery and segregation -- America's original sin, still hanging over us.

By sad coincidence, two of America's great strivers passed within days of each other, and have been honored in lavish and literate obituaries by two star writers in The New York Times.

Katherine Johnson and B. Smith both had singular success in demanding fields, breaking barriers and stereotypes.

Mrs. Johnson escaped segregated schools to qualify as a mathematician for NASA, and later made the pre-computer calculations that helped take American astronauts into space.

(My Appalachian buddy, Randolph Fiery, points out in a Comment below just how difficult it was for Mrs. Johnson's parents to seek a high level of education for their precocious daughter, involving a long trek over the mountains of West Virginia.)

Katherine Johnson and her black female colleagues were later depicted in the movie “Hidden Figures.” She died at 101 on Monday in Virginia and was honored in an obituary by Margalit Fox.

“NASA was a very professional organization,” the obituary quoted Mrs. Johnson telling The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. “They didn’t have time to be concerned about what color I was.”

B. Smith began as a model, wrote and was a television host and designed household goods, but was best known for the restaurant bearing her name in the Theater District of Manhattan. She died at 70 on Saturday on Long Island.

The obituary by William Grimes told how Barbara Smith from Pennsylvania was a dynamo in childhood: “I inherited a paper route, I sold magazines, had lemonade stands, I was a candy striper and into fund-raising,” she told The Times in 2011. “I’ve always enjoyed being busy.”

She had her self-image, and she was not shy about describing it:

“B. Smith’s brand is about is bringing people together," she said, speaking of herself in the third person, as basketball superstars do on occasion. "I think that if Martha Stewart and Oprah had a daughter, it would be B. Smith,” she told National Public Radio in 2007.

The success and resolve of Katherine Johnson and B. Smith, as they ignored stereotypes, would be inspiring anytime. In Black History Month, the accounts of their accomplished lives lit up my day.
* * *
(The obits are too long to reproduce here, so I am enclosing the links to the NYT website. People who do not subscribe can pull up a certain amount of free links per month. Other obits of these two achievers will surely be on the web -- GV.)

Katherine Johnson:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/science/katherine-johnson-dead.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

B. Smith:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/obituaries/b-smith-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

bruce

2/25/2020 01:40:40 am

george,

knew of johnson from the film.

hard to believe that was in our lifetimes or maybe isn't that hard.....

didn't know smith.

as for johnson's obit....margalit fox hasn't been with the nyt for a while now, but her obits continue to show up.

she is excellent.

bruce

George Vecsey

2/25/2020 08:55:24 am

Bruce: Not hard to believe at all. My friend Al from high school can recall being steered to "general" classes and he had to persevere to get into college prep courses: Advanced degrees, career in a government agency, good life, but had to lobby hard against the system.
As for the Margalit Fox, she may still be writing obits free-lance. I've written a few recently that are in the electronic queue. Sometimes you see an obit by a deceased NYT writer; they always acknowledge that at the bottom. It's a very important department at the NYT; some great writing stacked up. GV

bruce

2/25/2020 09:43:59 am

george,

true back in my day too.

i often say the educational system--in ontario at least--was far from perfect when i was going.

imagination certainly wasn't valued.

many things, tho not all, are better today, i think.

i don't imagine they tie southpaws' arms behind their backs these days.

as for me, i often say the best four years of my life were grades 9&10.

i know they pile up obits. read somewhere there are something like 1600 just waiting to be published. saw a piece in the nyt several years ago about the writing of and how often the writer goes before the subject.

they are very well written.

your former colleague in sports is doing obits now.

must be fun, if that's the proper word, writing them.

were the ones you did about sports figures or......?

bruce

George Vecsey

2/25/2020 10:00:30 am

Bruce: I can think of two that are "in the can."
One athlete, one official.
The official knows me, understood why I was calling, and cooperated with interviews, clips, emails, etc.
Obits went big with Alden Whitman in the 60s. He wore long black topcoats, had long white hair, could have been the Angel of Death in a film. He would call up big-time politicians and they would know exactly why. They'd have lunch, etc.
GV

bruce

2/25/2020 10:03:42 am

george,

that's funny.

bruce

Randolph

2/25/2020 08:13:55 am

George,
Thanks again, for this piece on two people that demonstrate courage, hard work and determination throughout their lives.
I would like to mention a couple of other “Unsung Heroes “: Katherine Johnson‘s parents.
Back in 1928, Miss Johnson was only allowed to finish the sixth grade, with no other educational options available. Her parents chose to transport the family 125 miles through the mountains so that she could further her education.
I know that area of the West Virginia mountains. And 125 miles as the crow flies would’ve been an incredible journey in 1928. I cannot comprehend how challenging it must’ve been for a black family to travel that distance, find work and housing, to support their 10-year-old daughter as she she took high school courses.

Her parents were true hero’s also.
Thanks again.

RF

George Vecsey

2/25/2020 09:00:26 am

Randy: thanks, man. Takes an Appalachian person to put this in perspective.I know how long it would take to go 125 miles across the hills in the 70's when I was roaming that territory -- roads all chewed up by coal trucks that took their half out of the middle. The psychic distance was massive, also -- a daughter with obvious skills, and a black school 125 miles away. Or think of those children walking into Little Rock Central, or hundreds of other schools. Thanks for the comment. GV

Hank Ratner

2/25/2020 12:52:38 pm

George,
I knew Barbara Smith very well. I hired her as a model back in the seventies and remained friends since.

George

2/25/2020 01:12:27 pm

Hank: I only knew her from her radio commercials, so lucid and low-key, and the occasional photo, beautiful and centered person. My friend was at the restaurant 7-8 years ago and she had just wandered off....the Alzheimer's was moving fast. They located her down the block somewhere. Horrible to imagine somebody that vital, gone so young. Best, GV

Alan Rubin link

2/25/2020 06:16:21 pm

Thanks for giving Kathrine Johnson and B. Smith a well-deserved George Vecsey Review.

I did not know B., but we always received a “long lost friend” welcome whenever we visited her restaurant.

I am preparing six, one and a half hour sessions, for an adult education course “Women Coders and Spies During WWII” to be given this spring. I have observed in all my research about wartime espionage that women’s roles were either diminished or not even mentioned.

In my opinion, and not to diminish that of the men, the women’s exploits were considerably more remarkable. They are mentally and emotionally better equipped to be spies (not to mention as politicians).

Although Katherine was at a later time, my immediate thought on reading her obituary was to add a section about her accomplishments to my course.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Let’s Celebrate Two Admirable Lives

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