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The Schofield Kid
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All on account of pulling a trigger.
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« Reply #22 on: April 13, 2021, 04:31:02 PM » |
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I woke up last Tuesday excited to be heading out for a weeks vacation. Laying in bed and I hear my wife say, "Oh no!", I can tell by the tone of her voice that its serious and she reads Laura's email. We are both stunned.
I joined the board in 2004 and my first post was answered by Kathie. I think I drove her a little crazy the first few months I was on the board asking questions. A lot I was asking was already discussed and just needed to you use the search function.
We became good internet friends and when my wife and I were planning our honeymoon in 2014, we were going to spend 10 days in New York and I asked Kathie if she wouldn't mind getting us tickets to a Yankees game. I wasn't sure if she'd be comfortable about taking two people she'd never met in real life but she didn't hesitate in saying yes.
Not only did she get tickets but my wife and I got a tour of the NYPL including where Kathie worked in the rare books section, not open to the public. We then had lunch before a subway trip to the game. The Yankees played Pittsburgh that day and won 7-1. After the game we went to a little Greek restaurant down from Kathie's apartment. We finished the night at Kathie's apartment just chatting like we'd known each other in real life for years.
On the cab ride back to our accomodation that night, I just remember thinking how wonderful Kathie was to spend most of the day with us. So warm and welcoming. A couple of years ago my wife's boss was in New York and I emailed Kathie about giving him a tour of the NYPL. Again without hesitation she said yes.
I'll never forget that day in New York. Such wonderful memories.
Kathie was the heart and soul of this forum. It's a huge loss, like Matt mentioned it's up to all of us to keep the board alive. I know I need to practice what I preach. I don't spend as much time posting like I have in the past. I'm not saying everyone needs to posts daily, that's just not practical. Life gets in the way but I'm sure if we all stick around and discuss Clint's new upcoming film and other topics that interest us all, the board will survive.
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"Winners are simply willing to do what losers won't."
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Matt
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« Reply #24 on: April 24, 2021, 07:09:55 AM » |
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Kathie's obituary in the New York Times has been posted online. The article mentions that it will be in today's print edition (Saturday, April 24). I'm going to post the entire article, which we usually don't do here, but these are extenuating circumstances, and the New York Times will sometimes require a subscription to read articles (especially if you've already read a few articles on their site without subscribing): Kathie Coblentz, 73, Dies; Not Your Ordinary Librarian
A Yankees fan, marathon runner, cinephile, editor, and, yes, a cataloger, she was the New York Public Library's third-longest serving employee.
Kathie Coblentz, a Renaissance woman who read or spoke 13 languages; collaborated on books about the directors Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock; and, during her day job, cataloged rare books for more than 50 years at The New York Public Library, died on April 3 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 73.
She was apparently grazed by a car pulling out of an underground garage as she was walking home to her apartment on West 58th Street, fell and hit her head and never regained consciousness, her friend and former colleague Jane Greenlaw said.
In that home, of 900 square feet, were some 3,600 books of her own, all having served as inspiration in her writing The New York Public Library Guide to Organizing a Home Library (2003).
Ms. Coblentz was recruited for a library job in 1969 even before she graduated from the University of Michigan, said Anthony W. Marx, the library's president and CEO. "She thought she'd work at The New York Public Library until she figured out what to do next," he said. "Well, she never left."
She was the library's third-longest serving employee, working most recently in the 42nd Street research library's special formats processing department of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.
Her supervisor, Deirdre Donohue, described her as the "matriarch of our work family," who cataloged hundreds of items "that were the products of detective work, deep research and skepticism about facts."
Ms. Coblentz was a bibliophile with interests that ranged well beyond the written word. Her blog on the library's website was full of eclectic arcana. She demystified a Wikipedia debate over whether the Syrian author of "Scala Paradisi" wrote in the sixth or seventh century. And she rhapsodized about photographs of the last "blue blood moon" seen over North America in 1866.
As a rare materials cataloger for the Spencer Collection -- it "surveys the illustrated word and book bindings of all periods and all countries and cultures," the library says -- she conducted public tours of the steel stacks beneath what is now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, reminding visitors that browsing among those books was prohibited and that researchers had to order hard copies of materials from the card catalog, which was later digitized.
"That's why catalogers are the most important workers in this library," she would tell her tour group.
Ms. Coblentz was a true-blue Yankees fan (she and a friend were planning to go to a game being played two days after her death), and a committed cinephile.
She collaborated with her former teacher from the 1990s at the New School, Robert E. Kapsis, a professor emeritus of Sociology and Film Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, on researching (including translating avant-garde European criticism into English), editing and indexing books.
She edited anthologies of interviews with contemporary filmmakers and was a contributing editor, writer and programmer for Professor Kapsis's interactive Multimedia Hitchcock project in 1999 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.
And she ran in several New York City Marathons.
Kathie Lynn Coblentz was born on Nov. 4, 1947. Her father was Dr. Jacob Coblentz, an immigrant born in Riga, Latvia, who was a bacteriologist in Lansing, Mich., where she appears to have been born. He also worked in Tennessee and Ohio before settling in Frankfort, Mich., where he was employed by the Pet Evaporated Milk Company and the Michigan Department of Health; he died when she was 10. Her mother was Sidney Ellarea Coblentz, an art teacher and artist.
Even in high school in Frankfort, in northwest Michigan, Ms. Coblentz demonstrated a bent for cataloging, winning a mathematics award for a paper titled "Some Possible Systems of Numerical Notation."
She earned a degree in German from Michigan State University in 1968 and a master's of library science from the University of Michigan in 1969. She learned Danish, Norwegian and Swedish so that she could read her favorite Scandinavian authors of murder mysteries unaltered by translation.
She had no immediate survivors. Her older brother, Peter, died in 1969.
For a lifelong cataloger who wrote a high school paper on improving ways to sort things numerically, her system of classifying her own collection of books at home defied library science and was ripe for parody. Ms. Coblentz had 16 bookcases holding more than 200 feet of shelf space in her one-bedroom apartment. The books were arranged by country of origin, size, sentimentality and personal obsession.
"Your system doesn't have to be logical," she told The New York Times in 2005. "It just has to work for you."
Sam Roberts, an obituaries reporter, was previously The Times's urban affairs correspondent and is the host of "The New York Times Close Up," a weekly news and interview program on CUNY-TV. @samrob12
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/obituaries/kathie-coblentz-dead.htmlThank you, Laura, for sending the link for me to share here. |
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« Last Edit: April 24, 2021, 07:20:07 AM by Matt »
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bdc28
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« Reply #34 on: July 30, 2021, 06:56:10 PM » |
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I don?t have words, and I feel awful just hearing about this.
KC isn?t ONE of our best on this board, she is THE best of us, hands down.
We could easily say how brilliant and how funny she is, how much each one of us had brilliant and
Thought provoking conversations with her.
I will say this one thing, she alone, made this place to be a safe space for
ALL of us. Whether the conversation be serious, Clint, or just being silly,
She made sure that everyone knew their voices mattered here .
KC was and is a irreplaceable one of a kind. A person I can say I will miss.
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"I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. What he was doing wearing my pajamas I have no idea..."
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Doug
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"May I make a suggestion..."
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« Reply #35 on: September 21, 2021, 01:20:04 AM » |
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I haven't been on here since last year so I'm just now finding out about this truly shocking and tragic news. She was incredibly intelligent, knowledgeable, level-headed, and kind. Even while not visiting here, I sometimes think of her. For instance while listening to the podcast the History of the English language and I'll think about her love of language and languages. As I'm sure most people can say, I never had a negative interaction with her, and we were allied in opinion of Unforgiven as our all-time favorite movie. Damn, this is awful.
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"Yes, well, when I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of a park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy." Frank Drebin, Police Squad.
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Holden Pike
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"If they move, kill 'em."
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« Reply #36 on: September 21, 2021, 06:56:46 AM » |
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Holy sh!t. I am so terribly sad to hear this news, I just heard today. Kathie was the absolute best. We hadn't had much contact the past few years but we met in person many times. She came down to see me in Maryland a couple times, staying at my house once when Eli Wallach was speaking at the AFI theatre in Silver Spring, and she took the train down for the day when Clint's longtime editor Joel Cox was presenting a screening of Unforgiven at a film festival in Baltimore. I had been to her apartment in New York several times and we had met for dinner a couple times in my trips up to Manhattan. We saw a screening of Once Upon a Time in the West together in Brooklyn, a screening of Unforgiven at MoMa, and were in the third row for the world premiere of Mystic River at the New York Film Festival at the Met with Clint, Penn, Robbins, and Linney in attendance. I never got a behind-the-scenes tour of the New York Public Library where she worked, and I regret that. We were both also rabid Yankee fans and had that as a bond beyond the films. Never got to see a Yankee game with her at the Stadium. She didn't go to many games, preferring to watch them on TV at her apartment. I think I have seen more Yankee games in New York than her, and I live three and a half hours away. Well sh!t. Apart from the zillions of hours she contributed here on the forums I am feel very lucky to have gotten to know her IRL, as the kids say. Seeing the world premiere of Mystic River was pretty cool, but I think we both enjoyed Joel Cox the best. It was a smaller festival in Baltimore at the Charles Theatre, just a block away from Penn Station downtown. It was the final night of the three-day Maryland Film Festival. This was May of 2001. Joel Cox personally brought a pristine print of Unforgiven from Eastwood's collection, so obviously KC and I had to go! But the screening was pretty lightly attended - probably a hundred or so people, maybe even less - and to the locals the bigger draw may have been Ravens Head Coach Brian Billick, who chose and introduced Unforgiven. The Baltimore Ravens had just won the Super Bowl that January and as the coach explained in his introduction (and THIS ARTICLE) he used the "deserve's got nuthin' to do with it" as a bit of a mantra in the locker room. Kathie literally laughed out loud when he said that. Which made me laugh out loud. Everyone stared. Including Billick. It was glorious. But that all wasn't the cool part. The cool part was Kathie and I were standing in front of the theatre, just chatting and catching up, and up pulls a van and out steps Joel Cox. Kathie and I were literally the only two people there, probably including most of the staff of the festival, who knew who he was. So he got a drink and hung out in the front of the theater too. We approached him to say how much we love his work...and he talked with us for about forty minutes. Just me, Kathie, and Joel. It was so wonderful. I have attended a couple dozen film festivals of all levels over the years and met many of my cinematic heroes, but the only autograph I ever asked for was Mr. Cox's. Not because I thought it would be "worth" anything of course, but to memorialize that terrific evening. Kathie nor I can see Unforgiven enough, so the screening was great too, but nothing will replace these two film buffs talking movies with one of the great editors. Had it happened a few years later there would have been selfies and maybe even a recording of the conversation, but in May of 2001 it is simply a memory to cherish. I am heartbroken to learn of Kathie's death but incredibly thankful for the memories and level of friendship we shared. |
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« Last Edit: September 22, 2021, 10:44:09 AM by Holden Pike »
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"We're not gonna get rid of anybody. We're gonna stick together, just like it used to be. When you side with a man you stay with him, and if you can't do that you're like some animal, you're finished. We're all finished."
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