Revisiting Annie Powell’s Obituary 73 Years Later

On her 87th birthday, Annie Powell wore white gloves behind the home in the Lowell Highlands where she would die four years later. (Courtesy Annie Powell Family Collection)

By Bernie Zelitch, Executive Director

When Annie Powell died January 9, 1952, the Lowell Sun headline noted her advanced age of 92.

They remembered Annie through her late husband John, rejecting the Sun’s own obituary of him to mischaracterize his legacy as a “well known photographer and optometrist.”

And, although they would have known Annie to be a well-known local photographer, the paper left out that detail.

This appeared in the Lowell Sun Jan. 1952.

I believe the obituary writer failed to properly memorialize a life, and that gender bias was in play. I note this with authority as, incredibly, my first job was as an obituary writer. I wrote hundreds of notices under pressures similar to those in the Sun’s newsroom.

Annie died of bronchopneumonia three years after moving in with her niece’s family at 63 Harris Avenue. It was there she left a darkroom and thousands of prints and glass plate negatives. Before that, she photographed municipal sites to support her room with roommates in a tenement at 90 Congress St. For 60 years, she lugged her enormously large camera and tripod through the streets, a wiry figure with recognizable wide-brimmed hats. The community–in particular family, funeral directors, and reporters who contributed to her obituary–knew of her very visible career.

Cultural gatekeepers were still in place twenty years after Annie’s obituary was published. At that time, I began a journalism career at the New Haven Journal-Courier (CT). The newsroom surely mirrored the Sun’s, right down to noisy manual typewriters, pasted-up stories with “-30-” indicating the end of the text, pneumatic tubes, and dangerous molten lead dripping into rows of type.

I remember early on City Editor Bob Granger assigned me to write up the new officers for a women’s club. I mouthed off when my initial draft was rejected: “Why can’t I write ‘Mary Jones’ instead of ‘Mrs. Frank Jones?’” “That’s how most women prefer it,” Granger responded, apparently unaware of the success of Gloria Steinem's Ms. Magazine. “That’s our official style. Just type.”

But in the 1972 newsroom, it was murky who was holding onto a culture bias from 1952. From my desk, I could see the editors as well as outside "lobbyists." Unlike today, when obituaries are paid tributes often written by family, newspapers then considered deaths as legitimate, free news to be handled by a specialized reporter. But the funeral directors—all but Iovanne and West Haven Funeral Homes—were men and initiated the process with their own spin.

The funeral directors would queue up as I scanned their typed drafts. If the deceased was a woman, I’d ask her employment. “She worked a few years outside the home in an insurance office to help out,” was a typical answer. “But the family doesn’t want that in.” I would persist and write up details, sometimes culled from the “morgue,” the universal newspaper term for the library of clippings and photos.

Circling back to the 1952 Sun newsroom, a woman’s work outside the home, whether in the mills or as a hand-to-mouth photographer, was typically not mentioned. Shame may have been a factor. Suppressing a woman’s work life could be the action of any combination of family, funeral director, or obituary writer.

In the morgue, the obituary writer would have found a feature story and photo of Annie on her 90th birthday which provided her church affiliations. It said she enjoyed looking through old photographs without mentioning she took them. The obituary writer probably looked at the morgue’s folder on John, which contained his 1928 obituary and year-end summary of notable deaths, both listing his profession solely as “optician.” However, John was a shameless self-promoter who considered himself an artist. Some of his overreach would have been there in clips, ready to turn myth into truth.

The day Annie Powell died I was 8 months old and living in Queens, NY. I would like to think that if I were her Sun obituary writer I would have dug deeper. In my tenure in New Haven, I remember a funeral director handing me the details of a woman named Betty Smith who died in an area convalescent home.

“Writer.” the funeral director said when I asked about her career. 

“Was she the best-selling author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?” I asked. 

Of course she was. That was my first front page story.

-30-

Published in our newsletter 1/9/2025