Nimble Necrology

The saddest sin of the obituary writer is to confuse the quick and the dead. Last week such disgrace hovered briefly over newsmen at the New York Herald Tribune, Daily News and World-Telegram and Sun, and then suddenly was wafted away.

All three newspapers said that a Louis Ritter had died in Scarsdale, N.Y., reported that he had been a successful furrier and hotelman. Then the phones began to ring. Next day both the Herald Tribune and World-Telegram shamefacedly admitted that the Louis Ritter who had died in Scarsdale was really a real estate operator and philanthropist, confessed confusing him with a Louis R. Ritter traveling in Europe who dealt in furs and hotels. Still gloriously muddled, the News ran a followup story about Ritter's funeral services, jumbled together the biographies of the Ritters, living and dead.

But the next day the papers discovered they had not been so wrong after all. The A.P. ticker brought the news that Furrier-Hotelman Ritter had just died in Nice, France. Back on the beam again, the Herald Tribune and World-Telegram printed new versions of their earlier prescient obits and brought their necrology up to date.

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