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EVERY OBITUARY'S FIRST PARAGRAPH

The New Yorker

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September 09, 2024

Alfred T. Alfred, whose invention of the plastic fastener that affixes tags to clothing upended the tag industry and made him one of America’s youngest multimillionaires—until he lost his plastic fastener fortune in a 1993 game of badminton, as depicted in the Lifetime original movie “Bad Minton”— died on Saturday. He was eighty-one.

- EMILY ZAUZMER

EVERY OBITUARY'S FIRST PARAGRAPH

Jacques P. Jacques, a marine biologist who set out to photograph every sea urchin in the Aegean Sea—an effort that took seventeen years and culminated in the 1978 coffee-table book “Take Me to Urch,” which our reviewer called “disturbingly erotic”—died on Thursday. He was ninety-two.

Doris E. Doris, an entrepreneurial drum majorette who shot to fame for her distinctive baton work in the 1968 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—but whose subsequent attempt to launch the Ross Dress for Less Arbor Day Parade met an ignominious end when a Snoopy balloon collided with a stoplight, cementing Macy’s monopoly on department-store holiday pageantry—died on Wednesday. She was seventy-nine.

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