Copyright St. Paul Pioneer Press
To place an obituary, please include the information from the obituary checklist below in an email to obits@pioneerpress.com. There is no option to place them through our website at this time. Feel free to contact our obituary desk at 651-228-5263 with any questions. General Information: Your full name, Address (City, State, Zip Code), Phone number, And an alternate phone number (if any) Obituary Specification: Name of Deceased, Obituary Text, A photo in a JPEG or PDF file is preferable, TIF and other files are accepted, we will contact you if there are any issues with the photo. Ad Run dates There is a discount for running more than one day, but this must be scheduled on the first run date to apply. If a photo is used, it must be used for both days for the discount to apply, contact us for more information. Policies: Verification of Death: In order to publish obituaries a name and phone number of funeral home/cremation society is required. We must contact the funeral home/cremation society handling the arrangements during their business hours to verify the death. If the body of the deceased has been donated to the University of Minnesota Anatomy Bequest Program, or a similar program, their phone number is required for verification. Please allow enough time to contact them especially during their limited weekend hours. A death certificate is also acceptable for this purpose but only one of these two options are necessary. Guestbook and Outside Websites: We are not allowed to reference other media sources with a guestbook or an obituary placed elsewhere when placing an obituary in print and online. We may place a website for a funeral home or a family email for contact instead; contact us with any questions regarding this matter. Obituary Process: Once your submission is completed, we will fax or email a proof for review prior to publication in the newspaper. This proof includes price and days the notice is scheduled to appear. Please review the proof carefully. We must be notified of errors or changes before the notice appears in the Pioneer Press based on each day’s deadlines. After publication, we will not be responsible for errors that may occur after final proofing. Online: Changes to an online obituary can be handled through the obituary desk. Call us with further questions. Payment Procedure: Pre-payment is required for all obituary notices prior to publication by the deadline specified below in our deadline schedule. Please call 651-228-5263 with your payment information after you have received the proof and approved its contents. Credit Card: Payment accepted by phone only due to PCI (Payment Card Industry) regulations EFT: Check by phone. Please provide your routing number and account number. Rates: The minimum charge is $162 for the first 12 lines. Every line after the first 12 is $12. If the ad is under 12 lines it will be charged the minimum rate of $162. Obituaries including more than 40 lines will receive a 7.5% discount per line. On a second run date, receive a 20% discount off both the first and second placement. Place three obituaries and the third placement will be free of charge. Each photo published is $125 per day. For example: 2 photos in the paper on 2 days would be 4 photo charges at $500. Deadlines: Please follow deadline times to ensure your obituary is published on the day requested. Hours Deadline (no exceptions) Ad Photos MEMORIAM (NON-OBITUARY) REQUEST Unlike an obituary, Memoriam submissions are remembrances of a loved one who has passed. The rates for a memoriam differ from obituaries. Please call or email us for more memoriam information Please call 651-228-5280 for more information. HOURS: Monday – Friday 8:00AM – 5:00PM (CLOSED WEEKENDS and HOLIDAYS) Please submit your memoriam ad to memoriams@pioneerpress.com or call 651-228-5280. Marjorie Johnson died the other day at 106, presumably peacefully and no doubt having completed another round of championship baking in her custom-sized kitchen in Robbinsdale. Everything in the kitchen was built to accommodate Johnson’s height. In her prime, which was longer than it is for most people, Marjorie stood 4 feet, 8 inches tall and would have blown down the street in a good wind. She might have kept herself in fighting trim just by talking, ceaselessly, enthusiastically, always with curiosity and with a particular vocal affectation where her voice sometimes trailed off making her sound like Floyd the barber on “The Andy Griffith Show.” Johnson, of course, was Marjorie Johnson, the award-winning baker. She had a longer dynastic streak at the Minnesota State Fair than the Yankees could ever dream of, the Yankees knowing a little bit about dynasties. She won more than 1,000 blue ribbons at the State Fair, more than 2,500 ribbons in all and was still visiting the Fair as recently as three years ago. I still have one of her tins, which might have irritated her, for she always wrote her name on her tins on masking tape. She wanted them back. Marjorie, I owe you a great thanks. In 1993, I took the “Garage Logic” radio show to the Fair for the first time. If there were other guests that first show, I don’t recall. But our producer at the time arranged to have an award-winning baker show up, Marjorie. Never heard of her and I certainly didn’t know anything about baking. Once she began to speak, I was captivated. I could hardly get a word in. And she always held my arm, reflecting a kind of engagement that suggested, well, hilarity, because if I tried to pull away, she held on tighter. The crowd loved her. She was the best kind of funny because she wasn’t trying to be. It was her munchkin voice and her going on and on until it was impossible to remember what the question was in the first place. She was a red-haired fairy princess in a red dress. It was easy to imagine her as the decoration on top of one of her own cakes. “Will you join us to start next year’s Fair?” “Oh yeah, sure, uhmmmmm.” She did. She was always our first guest for the next 32 years (the last couple by phone), always with her long-silent husband Lee in the crowd, until he died years ago. In all those years, she wore only that red dress. I think she had a sneaky sense of the theater she created. Due solely to Marjorie, our State Fair shows became almost vaudevillian, a daily lineup of crop artists, hog farmers, people playing spoons, belly dancers, reptiles, barbershop quartets, honey bee queens, the Whacky Wheeler, jugglers, carnies and crooners, 4-H kids, a daily animal brought to us by our animal wrangler Doris Mold. Of course, I milked a cow, many times. Marjorie made me think of how to do a State Fair show. You get State Fair people! Television soon enough discovered Marjorie. Not only did she become a regular on local programming, but she went big time with Jay Leno and Rosie O’Donnell, Kelly Clarkson and many others. Leno once had her be his correspondent for the NBA All-Star Game, all 4’8″ of her. Marjorie once gave a map of “Garage Logic” to O’Donnell and tried to explain the show to her. “I don’t know what you just said,” O’Donnell told her, “but I love it.” One year, we had the two most opposite women on the planet on the stage at the same time. Marjorie was first, but because she was pressed for time, we also had Sharon Jones, as in Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. Marjorie was in her chair. Out came Sharon, shimmying in a silver dress, smoky and soulful and Good Lord the real deal. We played “How Long Do I Have to Wait For You,” and Sharon sang along. “What do you think, Marjorie?” “Yeah, oh boy, that’s a lot of noise, yeah, ummmmm.” If we ever get a Mount Rushmore of Minnesotans, Marjorie will be on it. Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
