Being 14 and 12, Jen and Kels no longer subscribe to the literal truth of the Tooth Fairy, but they still like playing along to get a little compensation for a primary molar. Kels lost one a few days ago, so I thought I’d whip up some special packaging for smuggling-in a John Adams dollar in the middle of the night.
Dad would approve.
I’ve seen quite a few Harry Potter “What’s your Hogwarts house?” questionnaires. Take them if they entertain you, but the whole thing can be distilled to one question:
You are asked to perform a laborious task.
What is the first reaction that comes to your mind?
My father died one year ago today.
Being the son of this man who had written and edited for newspapers, magazines, and books—and having inherited his perfectionism—I didn’t let the funeral home write the obituary. After draft upon inadequate draft, I compacted his c.v. down to a dense brick of places and dates.
ROWLAND George Alexander, of Englewood and Park Ridge, died peacefully on July 15, 2009, in Royersford, PA, age 79. Born 1929 in Englewood to George and Marguerite Rosenwald. Dwight Morrow HS class of 1947. Bloomfield College 1950-53. US Army 1953-56, SSgt, Ft. Chaffee, AR. Bloomfield College BA English, 1957. Princeton Theological Seminary 1957-58. Editor, Prentice Hall. Editing Supervisor, McGraw-Hill. Managing Editor, Professional Books Div., Macmillan. Freelance editor, writer. Predeceased by brother Frank in 1985. Survived by sisters Marguerite, Florence, and Georgia, brother Charles, son Christopher, grandsons Jen and Kels. Contact: chris@zm.org
Unsatisfyingly terse, but I had to stick to facts or I’d have been writing and rewriting for (even more) weeks, casting about for the sweet spot between clinical and sentimental. How do you reduce a lifetime to a paragraph? The point, I figured, was to print a photo and just enough detail so an acquaintance reading the obituaries would say, “Hey, I knew that guy.”
When I submitted the obit to my dad’s home paper, the Bergen Record, I mentioned that he had occasionally written for the Record. The editor forwarded the obit to the news desk, and a staff reporter called and interviewed me for a “news obituary.” Very nice guy. We spoke for an hour, after which he distilled my ramblings into an article that would have made Dad proud.
Noted book editor George A. Rowland dead at 79
Friday, August 14, 2009
BY WILLIAM LAMB
The Record
STAFF WRITERGeorge A. Rowland, a longtime Park Ridge resident who blazed a successful career in publishing after considering the ministry, died last month in Royersford, Pa. He was 79.
Mr. Rowland’s career as a book editor—first at Prentice-Hall and McGraw-Hill, then for many years at Macmillan—grew out of a lifelong love for words and a facility with the English language.
Mr. Rowland was born in Englewood. His classmates at Dwight Morrow High School and at Bloomfield College acted in productions of plays that he wrote, his son Christopher said Thursday.
He also wrote poetry for his own amusement and drew fanciful cartoons that emulated the style of the syndicated cartoonist Jules Feiffer.
Christopher Rowland said his father often would draw cartoons on the brown lunch bags that he took to school—”sort of Buck Rogers-type of figures, or little cartoons of me in school,” he said. “Cartoons of how extremely tall I was suddenly, towering over him.”
Mr. Rowland’s tenure at Bloomfield College was interrupted by a three-year stint in the Army, coinciding with the end of the Korean War. He was not deployed overseas, and was honorably discharged in 1956 as a staff sergeant. He returned to Bloomfield College, graduating with a degree in English in 1957.
He enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary with a plan of entering the ministry in the Presbyterian Church. A gifted tenor, he toured nationally with the seminary’s choir, but withdrew from the school after a “crisis of faith” convinced him that the ministry wasn’t his calling, his son said.
Instead, he traveled to Chicago, where he studied at the American Academy of Art and at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Together Magazine, published by the United Methodist Publishing House, offered Mr. Rowland his first editing job, his son said.
Mr. Rowland returned to New Jersey in the early 1960s. He parlayed a manuscript editing job at Prentice Hall into a job as an editing supervisor at McGraw-Hill. From there, he moved on to Macmillan, where he served as a senior editing supervisor and managing editor of its professional books division. He worked for Macmillan on a freelance basis for many years after his retirement in 1986.
“The one thing that I most treasure in my influence from my father is his love of language, his love of words,” Christopher Rowland said.
Mr. Rowland died July 15. His older brother, Frank, died in 1985. In addition to his son, of Browns Mills, Mr. Rowland is survived by his sisters Florence, of Southern Pines, N.C., and Marguerite and Georgia, both of Lansdale, Pa.; a brother, Charles, of Modesto, Calif.; and two grandsons.
Mr. Rowland’s body was cremated. Plans for a memorial service were incomplete on Thursday.
Dad would have laughed: “Noted book editor.” Editors are never “noted.” It’s a wink from an editor at the Record, who noted him by fiat—a tribute from an admiring peer.
What my iMac has been seeing lately:
That’s the scanning window of Delicious Library 2, a Mac program that lets you catalog your books, videos, music, and just about everything else you own. You don’t have to type anything: If you hold a product barcode up to the Mac’s iSight camera—just for a couple of seconds, so it fills the middle of the scanner window—Delicious Library reads the UPC code and instantly grabs the product name, photo, and other info from the Internet, and adds a picture of it to the library shelf.
There are five tons of features, but none of it gets in your way. So easy. I got it in one of the MacHeist software bundles, didn’t use it for months, and just tried it out yesterday while culling through my hundreds of CDs to sell most of them off. I’ve scanned a whole virtual rack of CDs that I’m going to export to a list. It takes almost no effort.
I love living in the future.
No, this isn’t a paid endorsement. Delicious Library just rocks.
Dinosaur Comics today:
I emailed the author, Ryan North:
Subject: Gedankenexperimental design flaw!
“I imagine Earth seen from space, spots lighting up wherever people are looking, darkening briefly as they blink”
Problem is: If Earth is “seen from space,” someone is seeing it. The observer’s eye beams are illuminating their entire visible surface of the planet; thus, there are no eye-beam-less dark spots! T-Rex seems to be positing a hypothetical observerless observation. Oh, IF ONLY!
But wait! What if it’s a satellite capturing video? Clearly, a video camera encodes images even if no human is simultaneously observing the same scene. Therefore, when a human eventually watches the video (either much later, after recording and storage, or only momentarily delayed by direct broadcast), their eye beams must propagate through the video playback device and through the intervening storage, reception, transmission, and sensing devices, DISCONTINUOUSLY IN TIME AND SPACE, to faithfully emanate from the camera lens as the satellite took the video! Eye beams are not only infinitely fast; they travel nonlinearly in space and backward in time!
I LOVE DINOSAUR COMICS!
Less than a minute later, I got his response:
Oh yeah, I considered that! I figured the person from space was one person WITHOUT eyebeams, but your satellite with TV cameras works too! Assuming that crazy eyebeams in space through time is impossible, which, come on, is probably NOT the case.
I repeat: I love Dinosaur Comics.
Much cheesier than I remembered.
It being an unusual 100° in central New Jersey, I step outside the vigorously air-conditioned office to sample the heat.
The first thing I notice—other than that yes, it’s hot—is the quiet. The normally ubiquitous landscapers are absent from the corporate park, as are the construction workers who’ve occupied the adjacent parking lot in recent weeks. Presumably, they have either melted or avoided such. (The grass is dead, so I suppose the landscapers have less to do, but they always find some gas-powered device or another with which to buzz in the background of my workday—or in the foreground; last week, three guys with hedge trimmers blitzkrieged the shrubs at my window for all of five minutes.) Today, no drone at all.
Save for one dutiful cicada, all I hear is the hum of HVACs on the office rooftops. Even the rush of Route 1 a couple miles away is subdued.
The sky’s a solid, hazy blue with billowing white clouds.
The heat is a steady pressure, but the humidity is low, and the air moves just enough to remind you that it’s air. In the shade of a willow tree by the drainage basin, I draw the same judgment as just about every day: I’d be content at Disney World on a day like this. Today’s a day for Pirates of the Caribbean; not so much the uncooled queue of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
Just rediscovered this in my files. I played Teenagers from Outer Space in the late ’80s, and I was musing over what a jet bike would look like. I loved the design of the 1987 Honda Elite 150, so I traced a magazine ad and ran with it.
The 1988 Honda Etoile.
I still want one of these.
Just before I woke this morning, I dreamed I was in my father’s room in the house I grew up in, looking through his belongings after his death. In real life, he sold that house when I graduated from high school. I did go through his apartment after he was moved into assisted living in 2005, four years before he died.
The dream had the same uneasy, familiar wrongness as dreams of being back in high school or college: I could vaguely sense that I’d been there before and shouldn’t be again—but there I was.
Since he died, I’ve dreamed once that I saw him. In that dream, he was sharp and alert, untouched by dementia. I looked away for a moment, and he was gone: I dreamed that I hallucinated him.
Now I dream about his absence.
I found things of my father’s in this dream, but none of them had meaning.
What did I miss, Dad?
I bought a carton of eggs this morning.
The checkout register printed a seventeen-inch-long receipt.
In the words of my friend Ken: “You’re lucky you didn’t get another eleven receipts.”
