From today's New York Time
By Margalit Fox
As an obituary writer at The Times, I have the great, improbable pleasure
of reconstituting the lives of interesting people. And few people, it
turns out, are as interesting as the influential obscure.
My colleagues and I write about the famous, of course ‹ the presidents and
monarchs who make history from the top down. But the stories obit writers
love best are those of history¹s backstage players, the unsung men and
women who, though no one knows their names, have managed to put a wrinkle
in the social fabric. The obituary in 1995 ofEdward Lowe
<http://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/06/us/edward-lowe-dies-at-75-a-hunch-led-hi
m-to-create-kitty-litter.html> (³A Hunch Led Him to Create Kitty Litter²),
by The Times¹s late, great obituarist Robert McG. Thomas Jr., is the gold
standard by which all obscure comers are judged.
In the nearly 1,000 obituaries I have written, I have had the privilege of
reanimating ‹ if only for a day ‹ individuals whose lives are windows onto
the collective past.
There was Florence Green
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/world/europe/florence-green-last-world-w
ar-i-veteran-dies-at-110.html>, a 110-year-old Englishwoman who was the
last surviving veteran of World War I; Zelma Henderson
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/us/22henderson.html>, a Kansas
beautician who was the last living plaintiff in Brown v. Board of
Education; and Leslie Buck
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/nyregion/30buck.html>, the Holocaust
survivor who created the Anthora, the blue-and-white Greek-themed
cardboard cup from which a generation of New Yorkers lovingly drank their
coffee.
There were also the inventors of the bar code
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/business/n-joseph-woodland-inventor-of-t
he-bar-code-dies-at-91.html>, the Frisbee
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/us/13morrison.html>, the Etch A Sketch
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/business/andre-cassagnes-etch-a-sketch-i
nventor-is-dead-at-86.html>, the crash-test dummy
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/18/national/18alderson.html> and the Magic
Fingers Vibrating Bed
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/18/national/18alderson.html>.
By design or happenstance, these men and women made our world.
Little did I realize six years ago, when I began work on a new book about
the decipherment of an ancient script, that I would encounter the greatest
backstage player I have ever written about: a woman who helped illuminate
a world that flourished 3,000 years ago.
The woman was Alice Kober, an overworked, underpaid classics professor at
Brooklyn College. In the mid-20th century, though hardly anyone knew it,
Dr. Kober, working quietly and methodically at her dining table in
Flatbush, helped solve one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the modern
age.
The mystery centered on a long-lost script from Aegean antiquity known as
Linear B. Inscribed on clay tablets around 1450 B.C., Linear B was
unearthed in 1900 on Crete, amid the ruins of a lavish Bronze Age palace.
The script, which teemed with pictograms in the shape of arrows, chariots
and horses¹ heads, resembled no writing ever seen. No one knew what
language it recorded, much less what it said.
An unknown language in an unknown script is the linguistic equivalent of a
locked-room mystery, and despite the efforts of investigators around the
globe, Linear B endured for more than 50 years as one of the world¹s great
unsolved puzzles.
Then, in 1952, against all odds, the script was deciphered ‹ seemingly in
a single stroke. The decipherer was an amateur, Michael Ventris, a
brilliant, melancholic English architect who had been obsessed with Linear
B since he was a boy. He discovered that the script was used to write a
very early dialect of Greek; set down in wet clay centuries before the
advent of the Greek alphabet, it recorded the day-to-day workings of the
first Greek civilization.
Though Mr. Ventris¹s achievement brought him worldwide acclaim, it also
left many unanswered questions. He had planned to write an account of his
work, describing the incremental steps that led to his inspired solution.
But he was unable to do so before he died in 1956, at 34, in a swift,
strange car crash that may have been suicide. As a result, the story of
one of the most breathtaking intellectual achievements in history remained
incomplete for more than half a century.
Like so many canonical narratives of achievement, this story has a quiet
backstage figure behind the towering public one. And here, too, as in
other such stories (recall Rosalind Franklin
<http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/franklin.html>, whose work, long
unacknowledged, informed the mapping of the structure of DNA by Francis
Crick and James Watson), that figure is a woman.
Alice Elizabeth Kober was born in Manhattan on Dec. 23, 1906, the daughter
of recent immigrants from Hungary. A brilliant student, she earned a
bachelor¹s degree in classics from Hunter College, and it was there, in a
course on early Greek life, that she appears to have encountered Linear B.
Enthralled ‹ and already confident of her own blazing intellect ‹ she
announced on her graduation that she would one day decipher the script.
She came within a hair¹s breadth of doing so before her own untimely
death, at 43, just two years before Mr. Ventris cracked the code.
Dr. Kober never married, nor do her hundreds of pages of correspondence
reveal the faintest glimmer of a personal life. Each night, after her
classes were taught and her papers graded, she sat at the table in the
house she shared with her widowed mother and, cigarette burning beside
her, sifted the strange Cretan inscriptions.
Margalit Fox is a senior obituary writer for The New York Times and the
author of ³The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient
Code.²


Page 2 of 2
It was Dr. Kober who cataloged every word and every character of Linear B
on homemade index cards, cut painstakingly by hand from whatever she could
find. (During World War II and afterward, paper was scarce, and she
scissored her ersatz cards ‹ 180,000 of them ‹ from old greeting cards,
church circulars and checkout slips she discreetly pinched from the
Brooklyn College library.)
On her cards, she noted statistics about every character of the script ‹
its frequency at the beginnings and ends of words, and its relation to
every other character ‹ with the meticulousness of a cryptographer.
Sorting the cards night after night, Dr. Kober homed in on patterns of
symbols that illuminated the structure of the words on the tablets. For as
she, more than any other investigator, understood, it was internal
evidence ‹ the repeated configurations of characters that lay hidden
within the inscriptions themselves ‹ that would furnish the key to
decipherment.
DR. KOBER and Mr. Ventris met only once, and by all accounts did not like
each other. But through her few, rigorous published articles, which
together form a how-to manual for deciphering an unknown script, she
handed him the key to the locked room. After her death, using the methods
she devised, he attacked the mystery with renewed vigor and brought about
its solution.
It is now clear that without Dr. Kober¹s work, Mr. Ventris could never
have deciphered Linear B when he did, if ever. Yet because history is
always written by the victors ‹ and the story of Linear B has long been a
British masculine triumphal narrative ‹ the contributions of this
brilliant American woman have been all but lost to time.
By fortunate coincidence, an archive of Dr. Kober¹s papers had opened at
the University of Texas shortly before I began my research. As a result, I
was the first journalist to have the privilege of seeing her
groundbreaking analysis of the script in full.
Dr. Kober¹s work on Linear B spanned more than a decade, and the archive
includes sheaves of her correspondence with the few would-be decipherers
she respected, plus her tens of thousands of homemade index cards, fitted
neatly into ³file boxes² made from empty cigarette cartons. Like so much
of women¹s lives at midcentury, all this ‹ which reveals the steps Mr.
Ventris took in his triumphant decipherment ‹ had long existed outside the
reach of posterity.
I am not certain how Dr. Kober would feel about her role in the
decipherment being brought to light today. ³The important thing is the
solution of the problem, not who solves it,² she wrote to a young American
colleague in 1949. But I prefer to take my cue from a letter she wrote two
years earlier, on the publication in an academic journal of her scathing
critique of another scholar¹s misguided attempt to decipher Linear B.
³I hope he will not be too annoyed with my review,² Dr. Kober wrote. ³But
I feel that in scholarly matters the truth must always be told.²
So, too, in obits. After Dr. Kober died, on May 16, 1950, The Times
published a short obituary
<http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30E10FC3E5A1A7B93C5A8178E
D85F448585F9> article under the headline, ³Prof. Alice Kober of Brooklyn
Staff.² The article ‹ the dutiful roster of job titles and professional
memberships that typified obituaries of the period ‹ devotes less than a
sentence to her work on Linear B.
And so to redeem my profession, to correct a gaping omission in the story
of one of the world¹s great intellectual puzzles and to narrate a vital
piece of American women¹s history, I have chosen to reconstitute this
singular unsung heroine at length, at last.
Margalit Fox is a senior obituary writer for The New York Times and the
author of ³The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient
Code.²