My fascination with obits isn't connected to an office dead pool. It has nothing to do with respecting the dead, or a nostalgia for good old days during which I never lived. It's a way to keep my finger on the pulse of an era that once was and never will be again. These men and women I read about every day in the Times, on the wire services and even, occasionally, on the Internet have each had entire lives funneled into a few hundred words by writers who, often, are not very good. Reading these mini-histories and talking about them with my admittedly disinterested friends is the least I could do.

Talking on the phone with a friend a couple of weeks ago, I asked "Did you read the Times obits yesterday? They were great." I got a response to the effect of "You read those?" Or maybe it was "Why do you bother with those?" or "I don't have time."

That launched a long conversation, during which I told my friend about Jo-Jo Moore, a skinny, All-Star outfielder for the Giants in the '30s who on one noted occasion, sat out a brawl in the outfield while his teammates belted it out in the infield. He ended up watching the slugfest with a fellow pacifist from the other team.

What my friend said in that conversation isn't as important as the sentiment it conveyed. Obits aren't sexy or cool or hip or edgy or intellectual. People don't talk about them at parties or recommend them to friends. They're buried in Business and Local sections, sandwiched between other, shorter obits for which relatives pay and ads for mortuaries and funeral plots.

Even the New York Times Magazine's annual "The Lives they Lived" issue has a limited following. I read the damn thing from cover to cover in one fascinated, tea-and-biscuit-filled sitting earlier this year, and when I was done, I sent the thing halfway across the country to a friend who had a subscription but had thrown the magazine away after reading only part of it before I had a chance to talk about it with her. I still doubt she's read it all, but maybe she'll come to appreciate the annual publication, in which you can read about characters as diverse as Gwen Verdon and Big Pun, Jan Karski and Julian Carsey, who maybe should have had three obits, one for each separate life he lived before he gave up the ghost for good.

And the tantalizing combinations of people who share obit pages never cease to amaze me; and I always wonder if half of the people whose relatives die fully appreciate the folks sharing the obit pages with Gramma. On the same day the Times ran the obituary for Jo-Jo Moore, for example, the paper carried a recap of the life of Clifton Hillegas, inventor of Cliffs Notes, not to mention accordion player Boozoo Chavis, who helped define the zydeco sound and enjoyed a resurgence in popularity at an age when most of us contemplate retirement.

Zydeco sound? Who knew?

I was tickled the day obits moved on the wire on both Charles Johnson, the founder of the Flat Earth Society, and Adolf Levis, creator of the Slim Jim. These men likely never met. They didn't even die on the same day, yet they were linked forever in newspapers around the country. A man who believed the moon landing was a hoax and another who dropped out of high school at 16 and later became a philanthropist.

What a day to go out.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)