Explaining Bill Clinton
Mitcham, Marylee
FRANK McCONNELL, R.I.P. It was with shock and great sadness that we learned last month of the sudden death of Frank McConnell, Commonweal's long-time media critic, frequent book reviewer,...
...After a stint teaching at Northwestern, he liked to think of himself as a Chicagoan...
...My world, I know, will be much duller without him...
...PAUL BAUMANN 6...
...All of us at Commonweal extend our condolences to his wife Celeste, his children, and to the rest of Frank's family and friends...
...Frank taught English literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lived in Lompoc, some miles up the coast, a place he proudly called a backwater...
...He was only fifty-seven and had recently suffered from the effects of a fall...
...he was certainly popular with me...
...In short, a man of many enthusiasms...
...Among his other passions, as Commonweal readers know, were jazz, Shakespeare, and science fiction...
...at least not here...
...We had tried to arrange a meeting last fall during a trip he made to New York, but our schedules just wouldn't allow it...
...He will be sorely missed...
...But he was originally from Kentucky, migrated to the University of Notre Dame, and did his graduate work at Yale...
...I spoke with Frank on the phone hundreds of times, but I never met him...
...There was the one about the ten-inch man in the bar...but I won't repeat it...
...He appears to have been a popular teacher...
...He also wrote detective novels, once had his own radio program, and liked to appear on California beaches in a coat and tie...
...Frank McConnell did some fine work for this magazine, and a playful curiosity and genuine unpretentiousness infused everything he wrote...
...Much to our mutual amusement, he was delivering a paper on Frank Sinatra at an "academic" conference at Hofstra University on Long Island...
...Frank wore his considerable learning lightly, and like a certain kind of Irishman, he never phoned unless he had a new joke to tell, and he had a thousand...
...It was with shock and great sadness that we learned last month of the sudden death of Frank McConnell, Commonweal's long-time media critic, frequent book reviewer, and allpurpose West Coast (a place he had only ambivalent feelings about) representative...
Vol. 126 • February 1999 • No. 3
