Fred's Book Club: Better Dead than Fred?

Welcome to another Wednesday "Hump Day" edition of Fred's Book Club, also called the Humpback Writers, for stupid reasons you can probably figure out on your own.

This week we're tackling the worldwide sense of morbidity with our own lighthearted morbidity. I know it's April Fool's Day, but this book is for real:

Jane O'Boyle's Cool Dead People: Obituaries of Real Folks We Wish We'd Met a Little Sooner is a charming little book of brief obits for people who were in some fashion cool, and are in typical fashion dead.

I don't want to sound like I'm taking COVID-19's death toll lightly; a friend of mine turns out to be fighting it off right now, and the death toll here in New York State at this writing is 1,550. I do, however, think in these worrisome times that it is something of a comfort to know that you don't have to be a famous politician or celebrity to have led a pretty darn cool life, and that is the theme of O'Boyle's 2001 book.

This is a collection of obituaries of some people you've probably never heard of. But now you will meet them and perhaps get a truer sense of the stuff from which our lives are made. These people may be dead, but they remind us that the world is filled with others just like them who are more interesting than we probably realize. The next time you meet an elderly lady or gentleman -- or anyone, for that matter -- look into their eyes for the cool person who is still very much alive.

Here, in brief, are some of the people O'Boyle profiles, in two-page obits:

Edward Davis, of Detroit, the first black American to own a new car showroom (he started out as a salesman at a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership, but "He wasn't allowed to sell on the showroom floor with the white sales staff, so he converted a second-floor supply room into his office." Selling to the black community, he sold more than any of the white salesmen. In 1963 he opened his own Chrysler dealership.

Judy-Lynn Benjamin del Rey, of New York City, a four-foot woman who created "a market for science fiction and fantasy where there was none before." The Del Rey imprint she founded was one that graced the spines of perhaps half the paperbacks I owned in high school. It became the first home for a number of the biggest names in SF and fantasy, like Terry Brooks, Piers Anthony, Stephen Donaldson -- and she published some unknown guy Lucas's novel Star Wars three months before the movie came out. She had flair and a great sense of humor too, by all accounts.

FM-2030, of New York City, born F. M. Esfandiary. "A sunny optimist," writes O'Boyle, "with the futuristic vision that all people will be made completely of synthetic parts, he was a handsome and dashing man who spoke fluent Arabic, French, Hebrew, and English." He claimed to be "a twenty-first-century person who was accidentally born into the twentieth"; no surprise perhaps that he died in 2000.

Edward Craven Walker, of London, inventor of the lava lamp, which was originally sold as the "Astro lamp." "If you buy my lamp, you won't need drugs," said Walker, who also opened a nudist resort in Bournemouth, England.

Louis "Moondog" Hardin, formerly of New York, but died in Munster, Germany. Called the "Viking of Sixth Avenue," the blind Hardin spent more than thirty years hanging out at the corner of the Avenue of the Americas and West 54th Street, wearing a Viking helmet and cape. He wrote music such as the "Moondog Symphony," a song called "All Is Loneliness" (recorded by Janis Joplin), produced weird broadsheets against religion and government, and also a number of albums.

It really is a fun little book, brief at 143 pages, and more celebratory than sad. It's a reminder that not all heroes and oddballs and saints are remembered in this world, that anyone can be pretty darn cool, or at least pretty darn interesting, and that while all of us must die one day, all of us ought to live before that day arrives.