Post Staffers Are Under Pressure

"While everybody wants to find a villain in this, I don't really think there is one," she allows. "The villain is what's happening to the newspaper industry, and the economic realities. As much as I'd like to say somebody's really screwed up and we should go after some bad guy, I just can't find one."

Grave concerns: Years before Rocky Mountain News reporter Jim Sheeler won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize for "Final Salute," a 2005 opus honoring fallen Marines, he developed an unusual specialty: long-form obituaries. Many of his finest efforts have been collected in Obit, a terrific new book from Boulder's Pruett Publishing — and if many of the sections are tear-inducing, Sheeler notes that the pages also contain humor. "It may sound strange to say you'll laugh out loud when you read a book called Obit," he says, "but I've read some of these to people, and they do laugh out loud."

Although many Denverites were first introduced to Sheeler's obits when he freelanced for the Post, he developed his chops at the now-defunct Boulder Planet. "Part of my job was to type in obituaries that came over the fax," he recalls, "and I realized when I was doing that how much we were missing — how much was behind those five or six lines. So I decided that every week I'd write a real story about somebody who'd never been in the paper before." This concept is epitomized by his emotionally devastating tribute to Johnny Richardson, a jazz-loving shoe-shiner who died alone at 74. A reader whose comment is preserved on Obit's jacket offered a telling review of the piece: "Even the President doesn't get an obituary that good."

This phrase neatly captures a major subtext of Sheeler's work — lives of prominent officials or celebrities are no more significant than anyone else's — and he wishes more journalists shared his philosophy. "Especially with the problems newspapers are having now, focusing on local people whose stories have never been told is one of the few things we have left," he says. "It's something that absolutely should be expanded, and something that readers would pick up the paper for. It's not something you can do in a three-inch brief on the web."

Obit will be followed by a splashier tome: a Final Salute book, to be published by Penguin Press around Memorial Day 2008. Additionally, Sheeler is working with a producer who's hoping to attract financing for a documentary about another of his profile subjects, Brett Lundstrom, the first Native American tribe member to die fighting in Iraq. But despite persistent buzz to the contrary, he plans to return to the Rocky after delivering his final draft of Salute in early September.

Meanwhile, Sheeler has three Obit-related events scheduled: a 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 21, book signing at the Tattered Cover, 2526 East Colfax Avenue; a free reading at the Rocky/Post auditorium, 101 West Colfax Avenue, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 26; and a noon luncheon on Wednesday, June 27, at the Denver Press Club, 1330 Glenarm Place ($20 tickets include lunch reservations). The book clearly means a lot to him, in part because exploring death set him on his life's path. As he puts it, "I couldn't have done Final Salute if I hadn't written obituaries for ten years."