DETROIT _ In life, Donald Lobsinger made a lot of noise. He made a lot of enemies.
As Detroit's infamous right-wing agitator from the 1960s through the 1990s, he once assaulted a priest at a peace rally. As an anti-communist zealot at the height of the Cold War, Lobsinger led an organization named Breakthrough that spent years disrupting meetings, tearing banners, scuffling with police, haranguing anti-war protesters, staging publicity-generating stunts and chanting, "Kill abortionists." His antics and proclivity for violence made him a household name across metro Detroit and he once received almost 74,000 votes as a Republican running for Congress.
In death, he passed with almost no one noticing. And that was by design.
Lobsinger died Nov. 18, 2018, at the Orchard Grove Health Campus in Romeo. He was 84. His funeral Mass was celebrated at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Ray Township. Family and close friends attended.
"We sent out no newspaper obituaries," said Henry Malburg, owner of the Henry M. Malburg Funeral Home in Romeo. "The family didn't want it."
As a result the Detroit media never found out about Lobsinger's death. This article, 20 months late, is the first. The family-produced obituary on the funeral home website was brief, and only three people posted tributes.
"Don Lobsinger and his organization Breakthrough led the attack in the Detroit area against the enemies of the Holy Catholic Church, our Country and Western Culture," wrote James Jaczkowski, a longtime friend.
"Outnumbered and often beleaguered they never surrendered and the enemy surely felt their sting."
Harvey Ovshinsky, the documentarian and author who was a leader in Detroit's robust 1960s counterculture, recalls his many run-ins with Lobsinger and Breakthrough in a memoir scheduled to be published next spring by the Wayne State University Press.
"Every time we held a demonstration, regardless of the issue, we could count on Breakthrough to show up to protest our protests," Ovshinsky writes. "They were even angrier and more strident than we were. And, when they felt like it, more violent."
One of Lobsinger's targets was the Most Rev. Thomas Gumbleton, the soft-spoken auxiliary bishop and peace activist who opposed the war in Vietnam and the Reagan administration's aid to Nicaraguan rebels. Breakthrough started harassing Gumbleton in the 1960s, calling him a "traitor" and once hanging the bishop in effigy. "We want him silenced," Lobsinger said in 1986.
"He thought I was a Communist," Gumbleton, 90, said last week. "He would show up at a talk I was giving and disrupt it. It made it impossible to give the talk. I don't mind people disagreeing with me, but you couldn't have a discussion with him. He would start shouting."
