Deadline Missed

To readers of Pennsylvania's Centre Daily Times (circ. 8,795), the paper's chatty "Daily Half Colyum" was as familiar a fixture as the masthead. Ever since 1925, when Arthur Ray Warnock, dean of men at the Pennsylvania State College, began his Colyum, no issue of the paper had appeared without his low-keyed, often humorous comments on everything from world problems to flower gardens. But sometimes he had come mighty close to missing a deadline.

Last December Columnist Warnock was driving from State College (where the Times is published) to Harrisburg, when he suddenly realized that next day's column was still in his pocket. The mail got it to the paper in time, but Warnock resolved never to take such a chance again. He wrote a special column to be held at the Times "For the issue of the day on which A.R.W. misses a deadline." Wrote he: "I've had some close calls ... at midnight occasionally I'd suddenly recall, sleepy and half ready for bed, that I had not taken next day's column down to the newspaper office. So I'd dress again, and take it down--often on a cold, snowy, rainy, blustery, calm, moonlit night . . . I don't know the reason why I missed today's deadline--but it had better be a darned good one ... I've busted a perfect record!"

Last week, after some 6,000 columns, Ray Warnock missed his first deadline, and his last. At 67, he died in his sleep. Times Editor Jerry Weinstein plucked the spare column out of a drawer, crossed out the words "but it had better be a darned good one," sadly sent the copy to the printers.

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