LosGatosObserver.com

Obituaries Fri, November 20, 2009

• An Amazing Man

  Oct 29, 2009, by Stephen Kessler Obituaries
  

  Morton Marcus, whose outsize presence animated and at times dominated Santa Cruz County’s literary culture for most of the last 40 years, died peacefully at home after a long illness early in the morning of Oct. 28.  He was 73, and seemed both younger and older—younger because his attitude toward everything was one of boyish enthusiasm, and older because the amount of living he jammed into his years would have taken several lifetimes for anyone less charged with creative energy.

• Madam Mayor

  Oct 29, 2009, by Traci Hukill Obituaries
  

  I never met Mardi Wormhoudt. In the late 1990s, when I was getting my start in journalism and relegated to the sandbox of features writing, I would hear her name uttered in the newsroom and wonder at the hallowed tone employed by my usually cynical hero-colleagues. In the same way children take cues from their parents, espousing essentially baseless opinions about frivolous aunts or shiftless uncles, I came to understand that Mardi Wormhoudt was one of the good politicians. I didn’t know why. I just accepted it.

• Passing of An Icon: Catalyst Founder Randall Kane

  Aug 01, 2009, by Curtis Cartier Obituaries

  Anyone who’s ever spent a long night dancing and cheering under the bright stage lights of the Catalyst owes a little debt to Randall Philip Kane.

• Santa Cruz Poet Flew Under The Radar

  Jul 03, 2009, by Stephen Kessler Obituaries
  

  When someone close to you dies, it’s always strange, even if they were old and in poor health and you knew it was coming. When the deceased is a longtime friend, an exact contemporary and a peer in your shared obscure line of work, someone you spoke with over the phone the day before and who was no drunker than usual and otherwise in good health as far as you knew—when he is suddenly found dead in his San Jose cottage, apparently of a heart attack, at 62, your grief and disbelief are of a different order of magnitude.

• Elegy for James D. Houston

  Apr 21, 2009, by Geoffrey Dunn Obituaries
  

  Where does a writer begin a story? My friend James D. (“Jim”) Houston, a mentor and colleague, a literary father figure and cultural signpost—for Santa Cruz and California, for the entire Pacific Rim—is no longer here to answer that question, a circumstance that at this moment remains difficult to grasp.