In death as in life, Richard Ben Cramer showed again yesterday in several ways he really was/is something else.
He spoke at his own memorial service. He made the mourners laugh. And, achieving what no journalist in anyone’s memory had ever done, he got the flag over the state capitol flown at half-staff in his honor.
His friend and colleague Adam Goodheart of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center introduced Richard to those assembled – yes, a tape recording – who heard his rumbled reflections of what it meant, and what it didn’t mean to him, being Jewish. It was a typically droll, sly and not exactly reverential recounting that concluded with him observing that every Jewish holiday throughout history – each having something to do with tyrants going at least as far back as Nebuchadnezzar – all have the same theme: “They tried to kill us. They didn’t succeed. Now let’s eat.”
Chuckles and snorts followed, everybody aware that as soon as the speakers got done cracking up everyone with RBC reminiscences, a feast, with cigars (candy), awaited in the lobby of the Gibson Center for the Performing Arts.
The most solemn notes were struck by Gov. Martin O’Malley who spoke of Richard as “my brother” and announced that he’d ordered the state flag lowered in his memory.
Afterward in the lobby, some of Cramer’s old colleagues could be heard muttering about what seemed to them an unprecedented tribute for a journo, one admitting, “The only reason a politician would come to my service would be the grave-top dancing.” And another, from his Philadelphia Inquirer days: “If the governor did that,” twiddling a finger, “Richard is spinning.”
If so, he surely is, as he did throughout life, enjoying the experience.
The funniest moment likely was when Goodheart, who had a tradition of swapping Jewish jokes with Richard, told the one he’d been saving up for him and never got to deliver. It’s about “The Amazing Hirschel.”
It can’t be printed here.
There were, though, a hundred or two townfolk there who heard it and they won’t be forgetting. Ask around. You won’t be sorry.
And that’s how Richard wanted it.
Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times
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