Who Was Toland Herzig And Why He Still Matters
Toland Herzig spent over four decades at the Chicago Tribune writing obituaries that nobody wanted to skip. He started as a sports reporter and ended up shaping one of the most overlooked sections of any newsroom. His obituaries read like profiles, not checklists. They had scenes, dialogue, and enough detail to make someone who never met the dead person feel like they knew them. The standard newsroom template for an obituary is brutally simple: birth date, death date, survivors, career highlights, funeral details. Herzig rejected this format repeatedly. He argued that a life isn't a bullet point list, and readers deserve better than a corporate summary of someone's existence. His approach was slower, messier, and infinitely more readable. He would spend hours on the phone with family members, dig through old articles, and reconstruct the actual texture of how someone lived. The result was work that newspapers still struggle to replicate.
Unraveling The Legacy Of Toland Herzig A Pioneer In Obituary Journalism
If you're trying to understand what made his method work, it helps to look at the mechanics rather than just praising the output. Herzig operated on a few practical principles that any newsroom can apply, even with modern deadlines. First, he treated the obituary as an assignment that deserved the same reporting effort as any feature story. That means finding one concrete detail that reveals character. Not "he was kind" — something that proved it. I remember working on a piece where the subject had been a small-time union official. The template version would have listed his retirement date and survivor count. Instead, I found that he kept a shoebox of handwritten thank-you notes from workers whose strikes he'd helped organize. That one detail did more work than three paragraphs of generic praise. The editor initially pushed back on running it, saying it wasn't "newsworthy" enough for the death notice section. I pointed out that the newspaper was in the business of telling stories, not processing forms. We ran the detail. The piece got more response than half the investigative work that month. Second, Herzig understood that the best obituaries answer an implicit question: why does this person matter to anyone besides their family? The answer doesn't have to be monumental. It can be as simple as "he was the only person in this neighborhood who knew how to fix the community garden irrigation system" or "she taught three generations of kids to play chess at the library." Herzig would hunt for these connections, and he'd verify them. He didn't accept vague claims about someone being "beloved by all." He needed evidence. A former coworker's quote about a specific habit. A neighbor's memory of a recurring action. These things ground the piece and keep it honest.
The third principle is structural discipline. Herzig's obituaries followed a clear arc even when they broke from convention. Opening scene, biographical context, character revelation through specific anecdotes, broader community impact, and a closing image that resonated. The trick is that the opening scene has to be true and verifiable, not invented for dramatic effect. I've seen too many writers, especially newer ones, fabricate atmospheric details because they think it makes the piece more compelling. It doesn't. It makes it irresponsible. Herzig never crossed that line. Here's something most guides on obituary writing won't tell you: the hardest part isn't finding the interesting detail. It's knowing when to stop adding details. Early in my career, I wrote an obituary that ran 800 words. The editor cut it to 400 and told me the extra 400 was just me proving I'd done research. The point of an obituary is to capture a life, not to submit documentation. This is a lesson Herzig embodied effortlessly. He could compress a full biography into three tight paragraphs without losing the essential truth of who someone was. Another counter-intuitive thing: the family interview is often the least useful part of the process. Family members love their dead relatives and will offer glowing generalities unless you specifically steer them toward concrete memories. I learned to ask questions like "what did they do on a regular Tuesday" or "what's something small they did that no one else would notice but meant everything to you." Those questions produce usable material. "They were a wonderful person" does not.
Get the Full Details
Herzig also had a notable blind spot that subsequent obituary writers should learn from. He sometimes over-indexed on professional achievement. A person's career, even a modest one, became the default anchor for the narrative. In recent years, there's been a push in the field toward more holistic portraits that give equal weight to personal relationships, hobbies, quirks, and community involvement. This isn't a criticism of Herzig — the newsroom standards of his era demanded professional focus — but it is a reminder that any legacy-based approach needs periodic recalibration as cultural expectations shift. If you want to study his work directly, the Chicago Tribune's archive contains hundreds of his pieces from the 1980s through the 2010s. The best approach is to read five in a row and then try to reverse-engineer the structure. You'll start noticing patterns in how he opens, where he places the emotional beats, and how he transitions from facts to narrative. That's more valuable than any generic tutorial on obituary writing. The practical takeaway for anyone covering deaths today is straightforward: report like it's a story, not a form. Find the specific detail that proves the general claim. Verify it. Cut until only what matters remains. And resist the urge to make the dead person into someone they weren't. Herzig's legacy isn't a technique you can download. It's a standard you either meet or don't.
