OBITUARY

In every big organization, no matter how efficient, there are sure to be a few lamentable muddle-heads. But most organizations, particularly newspaper organizations, provide a system of checking which will prevent the stupidities of their dullards from appearing in print. Not so the New York Times. For although critics agree that the Times is the greatest newspaper in the world, its readers have twice within the last month been offended by bungling worthy of the yellowest provincial newssheet. The first occasion was when the Times reprinted as a quotation from a college daily part of an item that had been cribbed from its own editorial page (TIME, Dec. 7). Last week occurred another and far more glaring piece of flummery.

Many people are familiar with the name of General Harry Lovejoy Rogers, aide to General Pershing and onetime Quartermaster General of the A. E. F. Most people know that last week in Philadelphia this eminent soldier died of heart disease. The following headline met the eyes of many thousand intelligent readers who propped the New York Times against their breakfast water carafes on the morning of Dec. 15:

GEN. H. L. ROGERS, PERSHING AID, DIES

As Chief Quartermaster General He Fed and Clothed 2,000,000 Troops Overseas.

HIGH PRAISE ACCORDED HIM

Entered the Army in Spanish War Days--To Be Buried in Arlington, Probably Today.

Having perused this dignified and informing head, the readers of the Times folded their papers to read the article that followed. In anticipation of the obituary, which they knew would be capably, decently written, they perhaps poured out their coffee or lit a cigaret, before their eyes again returned to the page. But the first sentence of General Rogers' obituary made them gasp and hold the paper closer; the second and third sentences made them cry out with laughter or scowl with well-bred disapproval, according to their temperaments. For the article under the headline began as follows:

"Bum" lingers is out again. . . .

Gaping, incredulous, they read farther:

. . . A general alarm was sent out for his arrest by the New York police . . . to the rank and file of the police department he is known as "Bum." . . . He faced 22 years of prison life, including five years of an unexpired sentence in Auburn . . . clever and dangerous . . . handcuffs . . . a heavy blow from behind . . . two patrolmen . . . escape. . . .

Then the readers of the Times understood. This "Bum" Rogers was a criminal who happened to make his escape from the train on which he was being taken to prison on the same day that General H. L. Rogers met his demise. Someone on the Times payroll merely failed to distinguish between two individuals. What was the difference? They were both named Rogers. . . . He put the General's "head" on the criminal's cleverness--wrote the history of a gunman's escape under the epitaph of a famous soldier.

Fortunately the mistake occurred only in the first ("midnight") edition of the Times; the readers who were shocked were all dwellers in the provinces.