Anticipating Death

Even as Winston Churchill lingered between life and death last week, the press obituaries began to flow. Just three hours after his stroke, United Press International began moving 20,000 words that touched on every facet of his career. Columnists Marquis Childs, David Lawrence and James Reston, among many others, turned out past-tense tributes that read as if Churchill were already dead. "The advance obit writers had an easy time with Winston Churchill," Reston wrote. "He had anticipated all the great crises of life, even his own death.'

U.P.I, first began writing Churchill's obituary, in fact, back in 1931, when he was struck by a Manhattan cab, and has updated it regularly since. The Chicago Daily News had on hand an obit written a decade ago by the late Ernie Hill, then the News's London bureau chief; it has been rewritten twice by Hill's successors. Three months ago, the New York Times assigned Assistant Managing Editor Harrison Salisbury and two more staffers to review Churchill's life and revise the Times's standing obituary.

Abbas to Zulcor. Such forethought stems from necessity. The press must anticipate the passing of the famous and the infamous: an obituary hastily flung together after the fact often pays too little respect to the subject, to the past, or to journalism. U.P.I.'s "preparation stories," as the wire service calls its advance obits, fill a dozen four-drawer filing cabinets, and include such youthful candidates as John F. Kennedy Jr., 4, and the children of Queen Elizabeth.

The Associated Press, which numbers its prepared obits, is up to 4,226 (Pope Paul, updated). Number 2,496, sent to all member newspapers in 1936, did not prove useful until Nov. 1, 1947, when Man O' War died at the mature age of 30. Every six months, A.P. newspapers get a mimeographed list of additions and deletions; the notice circulated Jan. 1 of this year added Composer Benjamin Britten, Leonid Brezhnev, U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy and Author John O'Hara, among others, plus a few revisions (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Cardinal Gushing, Frank Costello).

Most U.S. newspapers are similarly prepared, though the obituary inventories vary widely, from the Boston Globe's ten entries to the New York Times's 2,000 (Ferhat Abbas to Adolph Zukor), some of them set in type. Times Metropolitan Editor Abe Rosenthai, whose responsibilities include custody of the obituary files, assigns their preparation to appropriate members of the paper's editorial staff. When President Kennedy died in Dallas, White House Correspondent Tom Wicker had on his desk, undischarged, the duty of updating the Kennedy obituary. As a new Times hand in 1946, Rosenthal himself contributed an obituary on Actress Miriam Hopkins. "I'm glad to say we've never had to use it," says Rosenthal.

Let It Stand. Some death notices, like Miss Hopkins', mature along with their subjects. In St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch obituary on former Mayor Bernard Dickmann, now 76, has gathered dust for 30 years. The Chicago Tribune cast two galleys of type on Charles Lindbergh so long ago that no one on the staff remembers the obituary's vintage year. During a 1936 visit to San Francisco, George Bernard Shaw, then 79, was offered the chance to edit his own obit in the Chronicle. Shaw let it stand.

When a New York Daily News staffer died in 1957, his obituary appeared under his own byline. "Do me one final favor and use this instead of an effusion by somebody else," wrote Lowell Limpus in a message that he had drafted some years before, sealed in an envelope and deposited, under his name, in the News's library.

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