OBITUARIES
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1993:
Marty Rosenthal, 79, died August 31 at her home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
The daughter of Lutheran missionaries who served in Africa, Rosenthal was born at Au,
Switzerland, in 1914, a few hundred yards from the Austrian border and the outbreak of
World War I. She met her husband of 55 years, Fritz Rosenthal, then a German chemistry
student, while hiking near Wengen, Switzerland. Escaping the Nazis, they emigrated to
the U.S. in 1938. Marty Rosenthal became involved in animal rights circa 1975, according
to daughter Esther Mechler, after reading Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation. She
became an active member of the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance, the Animal Welfare
Association, and, having become a Unitarian, encouraged the Unitarian church to adopt
positions favorable to animals. She also encouraged a neighborhood teenager, Bernard Unti,
to become involved in the cause. Unti subsequently served several years on staff at the
American Anti-Vivisection Society. In 1981, Rosenthal and Mechler formed the Marian
Rosenthal Koch Fund in memory of Rosenthal’s youngest daughter, who died in 1971 at age
26. Projects of the Koch Fund include the video production company Focus on Animals and
Spay U.S.A., now sponsored by the North Shore Animal League.
“She always spoke up, although she was very shy,” Mechler recalled. “She
attended protests, collected cannisters, wrote letters, circulated petitions, clipped arti-
cles…She was a very special lady.”
Maine chief medical examiner Dr. Henry Ryan has ruled the September 3 death of
Rockport activist Lorraine Tedeschia suicide. Tedeschi would have been 41 on September
10. Her husband Thomas Tedeschi and another male family member found her remains a
day later in her car, which was parked a mile and a half up a hiking trail she often used to
walk her pets. She purportedly shot herself twice, once in the chest and once in the head,
using a high-caliber handgun she bought September 1. A spokesperson for the medical
examiner’s office was initially skeptical that she could have fired both shots. However, two
notes in her handwriting were found, one in the car and one at her home, giving instruc-
tions for the care of her pets.
Thomas Tedeschi, who had a permit to carry a concealed weapon while Lorraine
Tedeschi did not, apparently removed the death weapon from the car before police arrived.
After a confrontation with police officers, he was charged with obstruction and was jailed
overnight.
Lorraine Tedeschi was executive director of the Non-Hunters Rights Alliance,
secretary and treasurer of the All Species Wildlife Sanctuary and Environmental Learning
Center, a longtime member of the Mid-Coast Animal Alliance, and founder of the Karen
Wood Memorial Fund, begun after Wood, the mother of two infant daughters, was shot in
her yard by a hunter in 1988. In the unpublished portion of a 1992 interview with ANIMAL
PEOPLE, she said she had received death threats because of her anti-hunting activity.
