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Delivered by Vincent Bartlett Crosbie
Funeral of Lucy May Bartlett Crosbie
Friday, January 6, 2012
St. Joseph’s Church
99 Jackson Street
Willimantic, Connecticut, USA
Forgive me if my voice quavers or breaks. Outside as my role as her son, I’ve given perhaps 100 speeches, to up to a thousand people. But this will be the most difficult I’ve ever given: The eulogy for Lucy before her closest friends.
All who knew Lucy knew that she was as integral to Eastern Connecticut as are the Willimantic, Shetucket, and Thames rivers.
And like those rivers, her life was enriched by various streams:
The headspring of these streams was the legacy she inherited at a young age: The daily newspaper her great-great-grandfather founded in 1877 and which the family has operated ever since. She never had to find a purpose in life. The Chronicle was the effervescent stream that gave her life purpose.
That purpose was to ensure the flows, ebbs, eddies, and course of news and information about the area’s communities. To satisfy the thirsts of people who wanted to know what was going on in the town where they lived.
She was the reporter’s reporter. If she couldn’t find a reporter to report the story, she would do it herself. (Indeed, it wasn’t unusual for police or firemen to see the Chronicle’s publisher among the first responders at a blaze or accident. On the day she died I finally disconnected the police/fire radio in her home.)
Her standards of journalism were high. Those who worked for her know that she brooked no inaccuracies, never meandered from objectivity.
She was a font of local knowledge. The high water marks of her work were probably the 100th and 125th-year commemorative editions of the Chronicle and 275th and 300th-year editions about the founding of the town of Windham, each of which offered a flood of historical information and stories about this community—most written by Lucy. (She even wrote a history book about Groton Long Point, the community where for decades she spent summers.)
Her career, which lasted for 66 years, ran a remarkable course. She began working part-time at the Chronicle at age 16, one month after the death of her father, at the time the newspaper’s publisher. She then completed in just three years a B.A. in Management from Boston University, thereafter working for the Chronicle for the rest of her life. In 1954, she became its publisher at age 25. Not only was she among the first women to publish an American daily newspaper, but certainly the youngest.
Yet another major stream in her life was her marriage and family. She eloped with a naval officer, who became her partner in her business and purpose, as well in life; raising two children in a household in which I can tell you there was nary a turbulent word ever spoken between Lucy and her Arthur ‘Bud’ Crosbie. His untimely death left her a widow for more than 35 years.
Her friends—so many of whom are here today—were the stream of her life that buoyed her those years. She was a loyal, loving, and faithful friend to one and all. Fun to be with, humor bubbled from her.
And like a river, she nourished the community in many other ways, in so many fields. She sat on too many local, regional, and state foundations, boards, and charities for me to list. She was an avid local philanthropist, most often anonymously. No worthy cause went unaided if she could help.
Every river must eventually end its course. In her hospital room on New Year’s Day moments after she had breathed her last breath; I watched as the sun rose over Eastern Connecticut and saw the colors of sunrise splash and play over her face. All I could think was that it was as if all the tributaries and streams of her life were saluting and celebrating all she had accomplished in life.
Today, we celebrate and tribute her, a life flowing with dedication, generosity, loyalty, love, humor, and community service. We shall miss her!
Thank you all for celebrating her fulfilling and remarkable life.
My local radio stations are OK. Yet I listened to shortwave radio when I was in secondary school. I strung a cheap bit of antenna wire out of the window of my third-story bedroom so I could listen to distant stations at night when their signals bounced off the Ionosphere and were able to reach my small town. That legacy is one of the reasons I love Internet radio. Years ago, I could receive only the FM within about 50 miles (80 km) of my town, only the AM stations within 25 miles (40 km) during the day or within 400 miles (640 km) at night, and only the shortwave signals strong enough to reach North America at night.
That’s why I love Internet radio. Every radio stations that broadcasts on the Internet is automatically within range. Over the past years (back in 1997 I authored the business models chapters of Internet World’s Guide to Webcasting), I’ve tried many Internet radio applications and aggregation sites. My favorite has become Tunein Radio. (They aren’t a consulting client of mine nor do I know anyone there, so this isn’t a paid endorsement.)
Tunein let’s me access 50,000 radio stations by genre, language, or location. It let’s me save my favorite channels as ‘presets’. And it synchronizes the Tunein Radio website and the Tunein Radio apps on my iPad and Android phone and on the Roku box connected to my television so that all those devices have my presets. Expansive, convenient, nice service.
Quick, get Quentin Tarantino’s scriptwriters on the line! Three hundred Buddhist nuns in Nepal have discovered Kung Fu as a means of self-defense and meditation, the Guardianreports. Gotta be an action movie plot in there somewhere! It comes on the same day that Saudi Arabia announces that its women will be given the right to vote.
Here’s an technology story that portends civil unrest in China during the this and the next decade:
SHENZHEN, July 29 (Xinhua) — Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency, said Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, late Friday.
The robots will be used to do simple and routine work such as spraying, welding and assembling which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers’ dance party Friday night.
The company currently has 10,000 robots and the number will be increased to 300,000 next year and 1 million in three years, according to Gou.
Foxconn, the world’s largest maker of computer components which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants, which some blamed on tough working conditions.
The company currently employs 1.2 million people, with about 1 million of them based on the Chinese mainland.
For more than 60 years, the Chinese Communist Party has been carefully (some say dictatorially) trying to grow the Chinese economy without creating civil unrest resulting from first industrialization and lately a conversion to a capitalistic economy. How to keep the country fed when farmers are tempted to quit the plows for higher paying factory work? How to keep the factory workers happy without slowing down production or causing economic inflation? Etc. The bloody Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 showed just how close to boiling over social unrest is in the People’s Republic of China.
If Foxconn, whose workforce is already anxious (some suicidally so), plans to replace a large number of workers with millions of robots, how soon before other Chinese factories similarly replace their own workers. What will such conversions means to the hundreds of millions of factory workers in China. Unemployment. Perhaps there employee retraining programs will be offered, but for hundreds of millions of workers? And to do what?
During the early 1800s in Britain, textile workers who were replaced by machines protested and rioted. They were called Luddites, after a figure from English myth. I wonder what will we call the Chinese software factory workers who will be replaced by robots and who will surely protest and riot?
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