Jack Knarr, an unforgettable newsman: RIP
It used to be that if you were a journalist, you couldn’t count on great pay or an adequate pension, but you could count on a great obituary written by one of your friends in the business.
That isn’t true anymore in this age of obituaries paid for by your family as part of your funeral costs.
Take this death notice published July 18, 2017, in the Tampa Bay Times:
Knarr, John Curtis, passed July 11, 2017. Survived by sons, John Earl William Knarr, Frank J. Trentonian Knarr; brother, Lenny; sister, Debbie.
That’s it. That’s the only published notice or obituary I can find for my friend of 49 years, a man who had been a newspaper reporter all his life, working at papers up and down the East Coast.
We worked together at the Trentonian for 12 years, where he was one of the most colorful staffers ever.
Jack was most often assigned to the police beat but his great love was writing features and columns on ordinary people.
He was a big man and he had a big heart. People knew that about him and they flocked to him. Weird people, down-and-out people, working-class people. They sensed Jack cared about them.
He was weird, himself. When he was young, he looked like the actor Omar Sharif, but he never took that seriously.
He was loud and boisterous and always fun to be around.
Whenever his desk phone rang, he’d shout out, “Yes, Mother!” or sometimes “It’s a nightmare!” remembered his longtime friend and former colleague David Neese.
Then he would cackle maniacally.
For a while at the Trentonian, Jack moonlighted as a live-in cemetery caretaker and often spent his nights sitting on a bench in front of the cemetery, talking to the people who happened by.
One Saturday Jack was working police and I was the weekend city editor.
I was waiting anxiously for three stories from him half an hour before deadline while one of his cemetery buddies, obviously distressed, sat next to his desk talking earnestly to him.
I yelled over to Jack to try to get him to wind down the conversation, but he waved me off.
Then he suddenly jumped up and raced into the men’s room to grab some wet paper towels.
The man had slit his wrists and was bleeding all over the newsroom floor!
It turned out the visitor had just lost his wife and had come to Jack in his grief and despair.
On another day, the police radio announced that a man with a rifle had taken hostages at a local bar.
Jack quickly called the bar and was surprised to end up talking to the hostage taker himself.
For over an hour, Jack stayed on the phone with the man, listening to his tale of woe. He finally talked the man into handing the rifle to a barmaid and surrendering to police waiting
“She needs no representation criminally because she did nothing wrong,” Lord said. “No evidence to the contrary will be found.”
Really, Oliver consulted Lord to knock down constant chatter from corrections officers – at work and online – since a sexually charged lawsuit surfaced
suggesting a romantic link between the apparently kinky wardens.
The nurse claimed she was with Oliver when she bought Ellis porno flicks and allowed him to watch X-rated films in the basement of her home.
The nurse also claimed the wardens pressured her to attend a pajama party, which she took as a threesome invite, and retaliated against her when she rebuffed them.
Lord attacked suggestions of Oliver and Ellis being
involved, which they have also denied through a spokeswoman.
“If the deputy warden was a man would people say they were romantically involved,” she said. “It’s disgraceful that a woman can’t have a close professional relationship with a male without being accused of sleeping with him. I thought we have come further than that.”
Staff writer David Foster contributed to this report.