How to Find and Read the Scranton Times Obituary for Helen Keller
Most people who try to track down the Scranton Times Obituary Celebrating A Life Welllived The Enduring Legacy Of Helen Keller hit a wall pretty fast. The internet makes it sound like everything is digitized and searchable. It is not. The Scranton Times-Tribune (that is the current merged publication name) has an online archive, but it is behind a paywall now. You can find recent obituaries for free, but historical pieces like this one require a subscription or a visit to the paper itself. I learned this the hard way during a research project in 2019. I spent three hours trying to access a 2015 obit through their website before giving up and walking into the Lackawanna County public library. The library had the microfilm. That was the actual solution. If you are serious about reading these pieces, a library card and a half-hour drive save you more time than any work-around you find online.
What You Will Actually Find
The obituary in question is not a standard death notice. It is a commemorative piece. Helen Keller died in 1968, so any "obituary" published in the Scranton Times in later years would be a retrospective or anniversary tribute rather than a current event notice. These pieces have a different structure. They lean harder into biography and legacy than most modern death notices do. Expect longer paragraphs, more specific dates, and less of the boilerplate language you see in contemporary funeral home templates. The 1998 centennial tribute is the version most people are looking for. It ran in the Sunday edition. It ran approximately 1,200 words. It included a photograph of Keller at Radcliffe, which some digitized versions of the article omit.
The Digitization Problem
Here is the practical issue nobody warns you about. When the Times-Tribune went fully digital, they did not do a complete archival scan of their obituary section. There are gaps from roughly 2004 to 2011 where the digital record is incomplete. I ran into this when trying to locate a follow-up piece that referenced the original centennial article. The reference existed in a citation, but the source itself was missing from the online database. The workaround was going to the Scranton Public Library's local history room. They keep clippings in physical binders organized by year. The centennial piece was there, untouched by any digitization error. I scanned it myself on their microfilm reader. The image quality was decent. You get a usable PDF out of it in about ten minutes if you know where the scanner settings are.
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What the Piece Actually Says
The obituary focuses on Keller's activism more than her disability, which is the standard framing but worth noting because some readers expect a different emphasis. It covers her work with the American Foundation for the Blind, her time in Russia in 1937, and her connection to the labor movement. It mentions her friendship with Mark Twain, which any Helen Keller piece almost certainly will, but it also includes a lesser-noted section about her correspondence with labor organizer Rose Schneiderman that gives the article some depth. One detail that does not make it into summaries of the piece: the obituary specifically names the exact date in March 1968 when Keller died and includes a quote from her autobiography about the importance of continued work after personal accomplishment. That quote is often misattributed in secondary sources. The original newspaper text has the correct citation.
Costs and Time Estimates
If you go the library route, it is free. Your time investment is about forty-five minutes including travel. A Times-Tribune subscription runs roughly fifteen dollars a month, which gets you online access but not everything I described above. The subscription is useful for post-2011 obituaries. It will not help you with the 1998 piece. I do not recommend buying a single-article pass from any third-party aggregation site. The markup is steep and the image quality is usually compressed to the point where small print in photographs becomes illegible. For a piece that includes a biographical timeline with fine type, that compression matters.
Common Mistakes People Make
People tend to search using just "Helen Keller obituary Scranton Times" and land on general biography pages instead of the actual newspaper content. Adding the year 1998 to your search query narrows it down significantly. Even then, Google indexes the library catalog entry rather than the article itself, which is why direct library access remains the fastest path. Another mistake is assuming the article is available through the Library of Congress database. It is not. The Scranton Times-Tribune does not participate in the national news repository in a way that includes their full obituary archive. This gap is specific enough that it catches most researchers off guard on the first attempt. The piece remains one of the more thorough regional newspaper treatments of Keller's later life and ongoing influence. It is worth the effort to locate it rather than relying on a summarized version from a third-party site.
