Grave Doubts Over a Last Laugh

Sheila Shea, who died in 1986 of cancer at age 43, is remembered by her friends as a warm, fun-loving person. She had worked in the accounting department of a Cambridge, Mass., company and had arranged and paid for a dinner for her friends after her funeral. And, as a last laugh, she had her tombstone in the historic Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord inscribed: “Who The Hell Is Sheila Shea.” But some members of the Concord Cemetery Committee are not amused. “The cemetery really isn’t a place to make a statement, it is a place of memorial,” Committee President Mary Elizabeth Baker said. The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery has a “national reputation” to maintain, she pointed out, because it holds the remains of such luminaries as Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Some Concord officials believed the word “hell” is obscene and have pushed to have Shea’s tombstone removed. Nancy Griffin, executor of Shea’s will, vows to fight. “No matter what Sheila’s reasons were, a person has a right to freedom of speech, dead or alive,” Griffin said.

--Eastside High School Principal Joe Clark, who leaped into the national conscience by roaming the halls of the inner-city Paterson, N. J., school with a baseball bat and a bullhorn, is being portrayed by actor Morgan Freeman in a film called “Lean on Me.” “It’s a vindication of what I stand for,” Clark said. His only reservation: “(Freeman) is a good actor, but I don’t think anybody can fully portray me.”

--Joan Konner, a veteran television journalist, has been named the new dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. She becomes the first woman to head the 75-year-old professional school. “Her record as journalist and leader is outstanding, and she knows the academic world well,” Columbia President Michael I. Sovern said in announcing the appointment. “I am losing more than a partner. I am losing a soul mate,” lamented Bill Moyers, Konner’s partner and professional colleague in the TV production company they created in 1986. “They (the students) are as lucky to sit at her feet as I have been to have her by my side.” Konner is a 1961 graduate of Columbia’s journalism school. “I am returning to the place where my obligations and roots are deep,” she said. “ . . . The best journalists of the future must be the best students of society. They must be at home with ideas.”