Bringing up the dead with Mo Rocca
Jimmy Johnson — the Port Arthur native and curiously coiffed football coach of great renown — is an active public figure at 76. Which makes him an unlikely figure to include in a conversation about a book about death. But reporter and humorist Mo Rocca’s “Mobituaries” isn’t about death; it’s about life. And maybe a little about death — at least the ways we remember and forget prominent people before and after their passing.
Ours is a big, broad culture. Any one of us could be excused for not recognizing a prominent coach in a game people enjoy watching.
“I had a crazy experience on a plane,” Rocca says in a sequence of words that has never introduced a dull story.
Rocca tells a story about flying for a speaking appearance at the University of Miami. He was seated in the same row as an older man, who — like Rocca — sported an admirable head of hair. He also was wearing a shirt that suggested affiliation with the university.
“I started a conversation, and I didn’t know who he was,” Rocca says. “And he wasn’t very responsive. I saw his shirt and said, ‘Oh, are you associated with the University of Miami?’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And it’s possible his shirt said ‘Miami Football.’ So I said, ‘Oh, Miami University has a football team?’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And then a flight attendant whispered something to him about what an honor it was to have him on the plane.”
The story dovetails nicely with “Mobituaries,” which is created from tributes or short summaries of the lives of people or concepts or institutions that have passed on, but not any that would be considered universally known. The book’s introduction includes a snippet of an interview one of Rocca’s “CBS Sunday Morning” colleagues did with filmmaker Nora Ephron, who discussed a musical “Imaginary Friends,” about writers Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy.
“One of the things you realize when you write a play about Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, who were in their time way more famous than I am,” Ephron said, “and who almost no one knows who they are and they’ve only been dead what, 10 or 12 years? — is that there’s no point in thinking about what people are going to say about you … because they probably aren’t going to say anything.”
That becomes the jumping-in point for Rocca’s book — a companion piece to his podcast — which tries to remember the passing of good and terrible people and concepts that have moved on. So Black Sheep Siblings such as Billy Carter get some attention. And the very deserving Founding Father Thomas Paine gets his space after a funeral attended by a handful of people, three of whom were his housekeeper and her two children. There are also pieces focused on ideas or organizations: A lovely piece covers Los Dragones de Ciudad Trujillo, a Puerto Rican Winter League baseball team, whose story includes dictatorship and Leroy “Satchel” Paige. Another chapter includes the black congressmen of Reconstruction; another addresses homosexuality as a mental illness (1952-73).
Rocca, 50 — whose career includes long stints on NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — says the beginning of his career and the book run parallel. He spent his 20s working in Dallas. There he wrote for the children’s TV show “Wishbone” while living in Plano. He speaks well of Plano (“only the nicest people”), but he’d spent his youth closer to Washington, D.C., where he could hit the various Smithsonian institutions easily.
“I remember making a commitment at that point to really pay attention to where I was living,” he says of his early 20s, when he was writing about a plucky mystery-solving dog for TV. “Who had lived and died there before me. It set me on a path. So I’m still that person who pulls the car over for a historical marker. I’m a big fan of Ohio. They have a great state historical association.”
Like many of us who enjoy a historical marker, Rocca also spent his life drawn to newspaper obituaries. Some of them would tell well-circulated stories about men and women who had achieved great renown. But he was also intrigued by those on the periphery. People who did great things that were forgotten.
Rocca says he has to explain to his interns who Johnny Carson was. Ubiquity fades swiftly. But he also finds his younger associates are appalled when they find out homosexuality was considered a mental illness as recently as 1973.
“That made a few of them gasp,” he says.
Rocca’s book has the graphic design of an encyclopedia volume, which is intentional. His voice drops to a reverent whisper talking about the World Book Encyclopedia.
“I love them so much,” he says. “They still line the wall in the bedroom of my apartment.”
He brings up Jonathan Greenberg, his co-author and researcher, an English professor and Emmy Awardwinning TV writer.
They had to whittle a sizable stack of note cards with Mobit ideas.
“Part of what drives us to read obits and be interested in them is this hope maybe we’ll be remembered,” he says. “Or how we’ll be remembered. That’s a natural human thing. I certainly hope to be remembered. But doing this project — the podcast and the book — I realized few people are remembered. So instead of worrying about curating a museum dedicated to you —”
Rocca laughs with a touch of unease.
“You might as well live in the moment. But I have a hard time with that. Toggling between diving into the past and fretting about the future. But I’ve realized the thing to do is spend time with people you value and work on things that matter to you. Maybe that’s the ideal.
“In general, knowing you’ll be forgotten is liberating. Right?”