Not much fun trying to interest an obit writer in a life, particularly a life lived mainly between the lines.
I wrote up a basic account of my Cousin Bobby’s life for the local paper, the Sharon Advocate. It was pure citizen’s journalism — I wrote it using muscles built up over 30 years of newspapering. Bare bones, just the facts. They ran it camera-ready.
But the obit writer at the Globe is one who does his own work, and it is hand-crafted stuff. Bryan Marquard is known to have a softness for quirky characters. I figured a Harvard econ grad who never really worked, an anti-war activist who was wounded in the Huertgen Forest was quirky enough. Silly me. Other, more newsworthy, people died during the couple-day stretch between Bobby’s death in Boston and his service in Everett — the founder of Cape Cod potato chips, a pediatrician who danced.
Bobby didn’t do anything, it might have seemed – except live singularly and dedicate a life to what he believed, despite the cost. The Globe guy asked for texture. This is some of what I sent him:
Robert Carlton Paul, died at 84. He was the son of the late Ethel and Sydney Paul of Sharon, Ma., where Bobby lived most of his life – most of that time just he and his mother, who died at 101 and was a widow for a half century. Bobby graduated from Sharon High School in 1940, then went off to Harvard at age 16 to study economics (“unfortunately, a waste of everything,” he told me last week. “I wish I had studied anthropology,” ). After three semesters his education was interrupted by the war. He caught up with the First Army, 9th Infantry Division, 39th Infantry Regiment two weeks after D Day. (His father was dying, and Bobby was home seeing the man on leave.) Bobby was wounded twice in battle, the most seriously in the Huertgen Forest, where shrapnel from mortar rounds ripped into his toes and arm. He was sent to a hospital in Birmingham, Eng., where bagpipes soothed his rattled nerves, and this began a love of the instrument that will continue until Thursday, where Bobby has asked that someone play a dirge in his honor. Upon his discharge he returned to Harvard where he became a more serious student, he says, and played baseball for Adams House, which won the school championship. “I was a great fielder,” he told me. “I couldn’t hit.”
Vocation? Not so much. He worked for a few years at his father’s business, the Sharon Coat Company, at 600 Washington St. (Years later he would still use the bathroom in the building when we was in town, such a creature of habit was he. Or maybe, just sentimental.) He also worked in an uncle’s industrial laundry in Chelsea. That econ degree came in handy: Bobby was a careful investor and spender – except for what at the time seemed like incredible splurges — ginger ice cream and Perrier in the 1960s. Once a year, after saving for months, he and his mother would go to Chillingsworth down the Cape and spend a fortune on a dinner . And each year, for decades, they’d go to Europe to art auctions.
Bobby invested in fine art prints – in particular German expressionist works by Max Beckmann and George Grosz. They filled the house in Sharon where 14 family members once lived together and managed to share one bathroom. One would sit at the Sunday dinner or on the Jewish holidays and it would be hard for your eyes not to drift to the Picasso line drawings of satyrs and voluptuous women. “They make me happy,” he once told me. When he needed funds, he’d sell a piece of art. He also got a disability pension for his war injuries.
Bobby’s real work was fighting for social justice.
He and his mother were a team, “traditional radicals,” as Bobby put it. (I remember when they took me to see the play “Hair” in 1970 at the Wilbur and when the character Hud advocated, “Black Power,” Bobby jumped to his feet next to me, raised his clenched fist and shouted, “Right on, Baby!” I wanted to melt and pour out the side exit.) Cousin Bobby and Aunt Ethel enlisted me to accompany them to the A & P market, placards in the trunk, where they protested the sale of non-union lettuce and grapes. They spent a lot of time protesting the Vietnam War, in various marches in Boston and Cambridge. They’d also participated in the March on Washington in 1963. If you walked by the beach cottage the family bought in Dennisport you might be surprised to see Bobby, reading in bed, and next to him a poster from the Realist magazine that read:
“F— Communism!”
Bobby would explain to agitated beachcombers that the word Communism was the real obscenity.
The morning after the most recent presidential election, Bobby was beside himself. He informed me that Barack Obama was only the second person Bobby had backed who’d been elected. Truman was the other. He’d voted for a series of peace and populist candidates, from Fred Harris to Dr. Benjamin Spock to Barry Commoner. The world had come around to Cousin Bobby.
He loved the Red Sox as a boy, but the surrender of 1949 to the hated Yankees broke his heart. He never really followed the team after that. His team became the Brandeis women’s basketball team – and he was such an avid and loyal supporter that they let him cut down the net after a recent tournament.
Bobby never married – a regret, he told us last week. He never had children. It was lovely to see so many people flock to his bedside last week, from as far as Berkeley and London. There were friends from the ’30s, Brandeis basketball pals, art lovers, and people from the Cape who never forgot his kindness. Old friends relieved Bob & Ray routines with him, argued over the price of parking and pastrami in the old neighborhood. He was surrounded, and held court until he fell asleep in mid-sentence, exhausted, but unable to quit.
He cut an eccentric figure, his style a product of sentiment and serendipity. He’d wear old school sweatshirts and random things he’d pick up at a dollar store. He had a weakness for Brooks Brothers. Stripes and plaids never seemed to clash in his mirror.
His religion: “mixed up,” is how he put it. He will be buried by Schlossberg’s Thursday at the family plot in Everett according to Orthodox Jewish custom. He picked and chose his religious beliefs, although he found Orthodox Judiasm the most satisfying in the end.. (Father Bullock performed his mother’s service.) By his bed we found a telltale collection of books — well-read Hebrew prayer books, books on the Koran and the Kaballah and Spinoza’s “Ethics.”
He has asked that instead of flowers people contribute to some favorite causes, Project Bread, Rosie’s Place and The Pine Tree Inn. An old friend, learning of his death, said, “He was an individual in a world of individuals.”
By Daniel Rubin, Inquirer columnist, posted March 14, 2009
Daniel Rubin 