Historian Mark Masek, 68, died on Dec. 31. A former L.A. Times reporter, he was the author of numerous cemetery guidebooks (including Hollywood Remains to Be Seen: A Guide to the Movie Stars' Final Homes), and wrote and spoke about the kind of stuff I count as a guilty pleasure: celebrity graves and disaster sites (as well as the LAPD End of Watch project, documenting the memorials for officers killed in the line of duty). I’ll let our mutual friend Scott Michaels take it from here: “Mark and his partner Jayne were an integral part of our fundraising Dearly Departed Weekends, with guest speakers, tours of death related locations (the L.A. County Coroner, the St. Francis Dam Disaster, etc.) with the ultimate goal of marking a celebrity grave. He was a good man and a fantastic historian. I'm going to make it my mission to make sure his online research and documentation remain. He also sold a joke to Joan Rivers. I have the receipts.”
