Linda Ehrlich
Offies czar, 1955-2004

Linda Ehrlich, who kept her warped sense of humor and amazing good spirits through 10 tough years as the Bay Guardian's credit manager and who was my coauthor on the annual Off-Guard Awards, died March 13 of complications from diabetes. She was 48.

Linda took her first job at the Bay Guardian, as a classified assistant, about the same time I began writing for the paper, in the fall of 1982. She took over as credit manager in the fall of 1984, about a year after I became a full-time reporter. We became friends almost immediately – Linda was one of the funniest people I'd ever met.

She kept a tomahawk over her desk, to remind people what would happen if they messed with her. She made sick jokes about PMS. She clipped advice-column headlines like "I'm Worried; It's Curved like a Banana" and stuck them on the wall by her desk.

She was joyously politically incorrect. She loved the Rolling Stones, the 49ers, The Godfather, and This Is Spinal Tap. And she loved collecting the strangest and most outrageous news stories from around the world for the Offies issue.

I did the first Offies by myself in 1984, but the concept didn't really take off until several years later, when I realized I was out of my league and asked Linda if she would help. She immediately announced that her title would be "Offies czar," that she would collect all the items herself, that she would control the drinks menu when we sat down to write them up (it was generally Scotch), and that nobody, including the publisher, could tell her what was and wasn't funny.

For 15 years we worked together on the project, finding ways to mix the bizarre (Ayatollah Khomeini's love poem to a tavern wench) with the political (Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, deep doo-doo, White House interns, pregnant chads ...). It was quite a run, and Linda never let me down.

• • •

Linda Ehrlich was born in 1955, in Columbia, Mo. She spent her early childhood years in Columbus, Ohio, where her father, Reed Lawson, was a psychology professor at Ohio State University. He died when she was five, and she moved with her mother, Carol Ehrlich, to Iowa City and then to Baltimore.

Carol was heavily involved in radical politics in the late 1960s, and Linda loved to tell stories about her mother's friends greeting each other with revolutionary slogans. She was political too but never took her politics so seriously that she couldn't laugh about it.

By the time she was in high school in Baltimore, Linda was regularly hitchhiking to Washington, D.C., for rock concerts and driving her mother crazy. She went to the University of Wisconsin for two years, then dropped out in 1975 and moved to San Francisco. She held a variety of clerical jobs before starting work at the Bay Guardian.

"Linda was the classic Bay Guardian employee," associate publisher Jean Dibble said. "She was a creative credit manager who was adept at not only bringing in the money but also keeping the bank happy. She was also the spirit and the research genius behind the famous annual Off-Guard Awards."

She left the Bay Guardian accounting department in 1994, and had faced some serious health problems in the past two years, but she continued to work on the Offies and was coauthor of the most recent edition, which came out Jan. 5, 2004.

Linda is survived by her mother and her beloved cat, Walter.

Tim Redmond

A memorial service for Linda Ehrlich will be held April 4, 3:30 p.m., Bay Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi, S.F. For more information e-mail Tim Redmond