This Man of Letters Cut to the Chase

Well, we’re putting John Seleine’s name in the paper one last time. He wasn’t famous, he didn’t die an unusual death and, in all honesty, he probably would have been shocked to see it in print again.

But here it is, five days after his death at 90.

I’m not normally in the obituary-writing business, but it seems the least I can do for a guy who wrote to The Times again and again on various subjects and, by official count, had 31 of his letters published between 1991 and 2000. But even that’s not the sole reason -- I’m sure 31 doesn’t even come close to the record for letters published.

No, what’s appealing about Seleine’s legacy is that, almost without exception, his letters were no more than a sentence or two. You can’t say the man liked to hear himself talk: in a medium where unbridled writers roam (ahem), Seleine reined it in.

From my reading of his letters, the shortest was five words: “NFL means Not For Losangeles” in October 1998. Runner-up, at seven, was and “Let’s hear it -- Alan Keyes for Veep.”

The latter turned out to be his last entry, on March 10, 2000, during the presidential primary season. It was nine years after his first, on March 23, 1991, when he wrote of the first President Bush in the wake of the Persian Gulf War: “The President rose from ‘Bush league’ to ‘world class’ in 100 hours.”

Seleine, who lived most of the last decade of his life in Seal Beach, wasn’t just succinct with The Times. His granddaughter, Julie Hudash of Irvine, has a copy of Life magazine with a letter from Seleine commenting on its naming of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. His letter, in its entirety, read: “What really hurts -- I didn’t get even one vote.”

If brevity is the soul of wit, Seleine must have been very funny. He was, Hudash says, but he could also be grumpy. Out of that mix of mirth and crankiness, he apparently forged both his beliefs and his decision to write tersely.

Many of his letters involved politics, but he was eclectic. After heavy rains in 1997, The Times printed this letter: “Dear Noah, save me a spot on the next ark leaving California.”

At the end of the 1997 baseball season, he got this one in the paper: “Thankfully, the baseball season is finally over -- sort of like April 16 after you have filed your tax return.”

Born in 1913 in Marshalltown, Iowa, Seleine became an aerospace industry accountant. “When he retired from the straight numbers business,” Hudash says, “I think he got a kick out of that creative, artistic challenge that writing was.”

Yet, his one-sentence offerings continually cut to the bottom line. In April 1993 during the Branch Davidian standoff, he wrote, “As a taxpayer, I’d sure like to know why we’re spending millions on the wackos in Waco.”

Or, from January 1993: “If pardons had been in vogue in the Old West, think of how many horse thieves would have become politicians.” The Times printed this Seleine offering in January 1998: “Sonny Bono had it right -- he was a comic before becoming a politician.”

Hudash hears in her grandfather’s letters the humor, dryness and sarcasm that defined him. And perhaps some anger -- his letters started only after Doris, his wife of 53 years, died of cancer in 1990. “He truly thought my Grandma got cheated,” Hudash says, “because she was only 76 when she died.”

Funeral services for Seleine are Monday at Forest Lawn in Cypress. Seleine is survived by four children, six grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren, according to Hudash. She says he would have gotten a kick out of being written up in The Times.

No problem. And with all due respect to a man I never met, I offer this epitaph:

“Here lies John Seleine: He lived long but wrote short.”

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.