Jeff Roth

In his nearly thirty years at The New York Times, Jeff Roth has become something of a living legend. From "the last man" tending the paper's massive archives to being one of the stars of the prize-winning documentary "Obit," he's earned a coveted ""oh, you'll probably get an obituary in the New York Times.""

Acknowledged in countless books, articles and documentaries, he runs and has reinvented the Times' 120 year- old "Morgues" for the Twenty-First Century. It's a subterranean lair of incalculable value; thousands of drawers, books, millions of photographs and hundreds of millions of news clippings weighing in at more than 600,000 lbs.

A polymath with an encyclopedic knowledge gathered from browsing thousands of files, from a "History of Beds" to "Death Rays" to "Lycanthropy." He always notes, ""It's no big deal, I just opened more drawers than anyone else and absorbed more."" He arrived there almost three decades ago to move boxes and shift cabinets, which he happily still does with vigor.

Jeff Roth's route to the Times was, as most everything about him, unconventional. A score of jobs, white-collar and blue. Jockeying cars and small trucks around the country, law enforcement, running a music label, stockbroker. He's lived enough of a life "pre-times" so that every once and awhile when an obituary is being written, he'll note to the writer, "oh yeah, I worked for that guy..." But it's his curiosity about what lies beneath and remembering why, that has taken him to be referred to at the Times and by archivists everywhere as "Mr. Morgue." But of course he never refers to himself as that, or an "archivist" too rarified, just a "filer."