Mildred Madison, upon becoming Cleveland School Board president, hugs a new member of the board in 1988.  

Longtime readers of The Plain Dealer will remember the late Alana Baranick, a longtime obituary writer who, in 2003, created a new obit feature, profiling people who would not normally merit reporter-written stories about their deaths.

Two years later, Life Story won Alana a national award, beating out finalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Life Story was a weekly series of charming pieces, and it was my good fortune to be Alana’s editor when she wrote them. (When Alana died in 2015, then-reporter Leila Atassi wrote her obituary in the style of Life Story.)

I’ve been thinking about Life Story and Alana’s approach to all obituaries this week because of emails I received from readers asking why we failed to note the deaths of two prominent Clevelanders. Back when Alana was writing obituaries, both would have been certainties as subjects.

The answer is that we don’t publish many obituaries these days – a handful a year. As I’ve mentioned many times, the media’s financial challenges of the past decades have compelled newsrooms like ours to shrink. Our near-constant assessment of what our subscribers read on our platforms has helped us focus resources on higher-interest content, and obituaries are something we dropped.

We rationalize a bit that we still publish paid death notices, written by families and funeral homes. They do find an audience, while providing us with revenue that supports our publishing of other content. But death notices are not obituaries. They are not the kind of quality storytelling Alana and her longtime colleagues Richard Peery and Wally Guenther produced.

The two people readers mentioned this week are Mildred Madison, a well known civic leader in Cleveland and later Detroit, and renowned antiquarian bookseller John T. Zubal.

Madison was the subject of an obituary in the Detroit Free Press. She was a Cleveland City Councilwoman for two terms, the first woman president of the Cleveland Board of Education and a member of the state board of education. As president of the League of Women Voters, she led the charge to reduce Cleveland’s council from 33 to 21 members, persuading voters to make that change in 1981.

She described herself as the granddaughter of slaves, whom she noted could not vote, and she wrote a column for the Free Press three years ago proudly saying she had voted in 71 elections. She dedicated herself to voting rights throughout her public service. A run through The Plain Dealer archives turns up countless stories about her, revealing her effectiveness at getting things done. She was a remarkable Clevelander.

John T. Zubal at age 42, in his internationally known bookstore in Cleveland. 

Zubal was a legendary bookseller who, for a time, was in the running for the Guinness World Book of Records recognition as owner of more books than anyone else --  more than a million.  His stacks of books in a warehouse (and former Twinkie bakery) on West. 25th Street were perused by such notables as Stephen King, William Safire, Dick Cavett and Harvey Pekar, who included the place in his American Splendor comics.

He immersed himself in bookselling from an early age, built an enormous collection and was early to embrace the internet as an efficient selling tool. He closed most of his stacks to the public as he moved sales online, but for reasons I can’t remember, I met him there about 20 years ago and was permitted to peruse. I was looking for something specific and rare, and I think he had seven copies. 

Reporters love bookstores, so the newspaper archives contain plenty of Zubal references. The best of them is a 1996 piece by then-Homes Editor Karen Sandstrom, who captured both the inviting personality of Zubal and the spectacle of his book holdings from a tour he gave her. 

Zubal died in May, and his family wrote a lovely tribute in his death notice.  (I’ve also republished Karen’s story on cleveland.com, so a new generation can enjoy it.)

I can only imagine the pieces Alana would have written on Madison and Zubal. Their passing should be noted by Greater Cleveland, and once was the time when our newsroom would have noted them. No one does that today.

Normally, this would be the place in the column where I offer you our solution going forward. Sadly, I don’t have one. We have too many other priorities for our limited resources, and there’s nothing we can justify giving up to write obituaries. Some of you will write to suggest freelance, but we don’t have extra capacity there, either.

We had hoped at one point that a foundation might endow or fund some positions in our newsrooms to cover areas we don’t get to now, and obituaries would be worthy of such investment. We have not been successful in that area.

I feel bad about where we stand. Communally noting the deaths of notables and others ties a community together. I wish we remained the vehicle for that. Paid death notices partially fill the void, but they’re not enough. 

Madison, Zubal and so many others deserve our contemplation upon their passing. 

Their life stories should all be told, and we’ll keep looking for a solution.

I’m at [email protected]. 

Thanks for reading.