Hinch wept that morning in 1991 when she was summoned into the office of the Press-Telegram's recently arrived editor and informed that she was being assigned to write obituaries full time. She went home crying and didn't come back all day. "She was horrified," acknowledges Saundra Keyes, the editor of the Press-Telegram then and now editor at the Honolulu Advertiser. "She thought my request was a negative comment on her work. She asked if I had something against her. She believed I was putting her out to pasture. She was devastated."
Keyes insists the move was a compliment, emphasizing that it was Hinch's talent, personality and insight that made her the perfect choice to write life-story obituaries about everyday people. "But convincing Robin took quite a selling job," she says with a chuckle. Finally, Keyes compromised: if Hinch would take the assignment and set a standard of quality for the job, she could stop writing obituaries at the end of the year. "But in just those few months," says Hinch, "I was in heaven."
Larry Troxel's license-plate frame says, "I'd rather be watching 'The Andy Griffith Show.'" The walls of his Newport Beach home say, "A serious Andy Griffith fan lives here." The walls are covered with framed, autographed photos of Andy; his TV son, Opie; and anyone else who had the briefest brush with the folksy show. But the heart behind this fan-turned-fanatic said something far more poignant: here was a man in search of a childhood. He queried relatives often about his own youth. "Was I there? Did I have fun?" he'd ask when they talked of past events, as if trying to reconstruct memories that had escaped his recollection. It was as though the perfect childhood was an elusive thing for Larry, the son of a jazz musician who was often on the road. And only a fictionalized version of those long-lost early years could match his vision of an ideal youth. He started watching the show as a child—a child just one week older than Ron Howard, who played Opie. Larry even looked like Opie, with his cute little brush cut and confident stride. To Larry, the show represented a simpler, more wholesome time, filled with fun, understanding and family values—things he was trying to bring to the childhood of his own seven-year-old son, Brian. One of his many Griffith photos is of Andy and Opie, poles in hand, on their way to the fishing hole, Opie gazing adoringly at his dad. Larry had promised Brian he'd take him fishing before Christmas and bring that photo to life. But that was one childhood memory that wasn't to be. Larry rose early Sunday, not feeling well. He went out to the patio with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and had a massive heart attack. He was 44.
People rarely cry when Hinch is interviewing them about someone who has just died. "Maybe because I get to them so soon—the death hasn't really hit them, and [in the] meantime, they're just in coping mode. You know, call the relatives, call the mortuary, make the funeral arrangements, talk to the newspaper reporter," Hinch speculates. "But I think it's also because I'm not talking to them about loss. I'm talking to them about the life that has been lived. And people love to talk about people they love."
If you've lived in Fullerton for any length of time, you've undoubtedly seen Irene Bunnell—better known to her family as Gooma, and in the community as the Pink Lady—floating around town, dressed all in pink, of course, right down to her dyed tennis shoes. She cruised the streets in her white '78 Pontiac, the one she called her Boom car after her late husband's nickname, with Boom's old tan cowboy hat centered on the rear-window ledge. She said it made her feel as if Boom were still with her. She'd spent 50 of her 86 years in the same house in Fullerton, taking care of Boom, raising two daughters and immersing herself in tracing her family's heritage. It was serious business, this heritage tracking. Irene swore she traced her family back to Egypt—to the guards of King Tut's hill. That's the origin of the name Tuttle, she said—Irene's maiden name. . . . Irene could document her family's crossing on theMayflower, their relationship to Charlemagne, and that someone in her lineage had signed the Magna Carta. She said she traced one line back to Adam.
Even after 10 years of success—Hinch has won numerous awards and counseled at many writing seminars—not everybody is entirely comfortable with the Life Story style of obituary writing. A couple of her colleagues have professional reservations. "Robin is a wonderful writer, but these stories don't set quite right, journalistically," said one. "They frequently have no attribution, no quotes and are written familiarly, as though the reporter knew the person, when really, they never met. It seems a little smug."
Register editor Katz bristles at such criticism. She insists Hinch's stories must pass the same muster as everything else that appears in the paper. "Are they factual? Yes. Are they accurate? Yes. Do they also have a storytelling voice? Yes," Katz says. "That's true of all good features." Another colleague half-jokingly aired fears of becoming the subject of one of Hinch's summaries. "If I die in Orange County, roll me over the county line so that nobody knows what kind of hat I wore and that my kids called me Pookie." You could call him a dwarf. You could call him a short-statured person. But the one thing you could not call Richard Crandall was Dick. That was not his name, and he hated it. And with all the things he could not control—such as steps as tall as his tibia, sinks he couldn't possibly reach, and light switches mounted dreams away—Richard's name was one thing over which he could take undeniable command. At just three feet, 10 inches, Richard, who was 57 when he died Tuesday, was about the size of a three-year-old—a three-year-old with disproportionately short arms and legs. He saw people's belt buckles before he saw the color of their eyes. He couldn't sit on a regular chair. Hinch acknowledges that her style is unique but makes no apologies for her techniques—or their results. "I've written a couple of stories where people thought I was too hard on a person, or where somebody wondered about the accuracy of a particular anecdote, or where I was accused of painting somebody in an unpleasant light," she says. "But then I'd get just the opposite response from the family." She sighs. "I'm just so interested in people; I'm a compulsive eavesdropper. I can sit in an airport or at Disneyland and listen to what people are saying as they walk by. You don't want to go out to dinner with me—I'll be eavesdropping on the people at the next table. I'm just so touched by people's candor. They'll tell you the most intimate details of their lives." He was a convicted rapist, child molester and murderer—the man who killed her mother. But to Fredericka Saterfield, Fred Saterfield was her dad—"the only thing I knew I had that was mine." Occasionally, he sent her money from prison. Always he answered her letters. But his hugs were forced and lacking warmth. He never said, "I love you." He was hardly a father in the traditional sense. Her half sisters wanted nothing to do with him. They were in their Santa Ana home that fateful Thanksgiving Day in 1965 when Fred put bullets in the left temple of their mother, Patsy, and their sister, Mary. They shed the name Saterfield like ducks shaking water off their backs. Fredericka, who was only four at the time of the murders, hung tough. "It doesn't matter what he did," she says now. "He was my father." And when, a few days after Fred's death Nov. 7 at age 83 in state prison at Corcoran, she received the two boxes of his few personal effects, she just stared at them for hours, at a loss for how to feel. "I cried for days over the death of Lucille Ball," she said with a sheepish giggle during a recent interview in her home in Corona. "But for my dad, I don't know."That's the thing about life and death: nobody knows. Our heartbeats are just a drumroll, the fanfare to their own demise—pending the verification of a few details, of course, like heaven or hell. In some sense, the paragraphs in a newspaper obituary constitute as much of the afterlife as we can quantify. "I wish I could say something effective and philosophical about all of this, but even with all the writing I've done about death, I still can't," Hinch says. "Objectively, I do see death as part of life. But talk of heaven and things? I don't know about meeting people in heaven, but I definitely think you leave parts of yourself with those you leave behind. I don't expect to see my mother in heaven, but my kids know her because I have talked about her so much." Either way, nobody has much control over the way things turns out. "How I'm remembered will be up to my kids," Hinch realizes. "I'm interested in what they will say about me after I die—what they will tell the newspaper reporter who calls for information to write my obituary. I'm dying to know, actually. I've asked them, but they don't want to go into it. I think it troubles them. So all I can do is speculate." And as she does, Hinch's thoughts become entwined with the answers she receives when she's asking someone about a deceased friend or relative. "So many people tell me, 'Oh, she never met a stranger.' Or they'll say, 'He never had an enemy,'" Hinch says. She pauses and then chuckles. "Nobody will be able to say that about me. I'm far too volatile." Hinch remembers when her sister died in northern California. She was at the house when the obituary reporter phoned from the Contra Costa Times, and she listened to what her sister's daughter had to say. "My niece told the reporter, 'My mother never said a mean word in her life,'" Hinch recounts, and then she winces and smiles. "I just thought, 'Oh, yeah? Well, to me, she did!'"
