Warden

Newspapers take great pains to keep records of the lives of well-known men to be published when these men are dead; every office maintains a grim and bulky index known as the "Morgue," which must be kept up to date from week to week and is generally entrusted to the care of some scarred battle-horse of a reporter, himself soon due to fare earthward on his last assignment. But if a personage dies at an awkward hour, if the announcement reaches the office just as the paper is going to press or the editor to the races, the obituary in the first edition is apt to be brief. And so it fell out in the death of Thomas Mott Osborne, famed warden of Sing Sing, whose demise the Boston Herald covered last week. The notice-- a two-inch filler on the front page --was headlined simply:

THOMAS MOTT OSBORN DEAD IN FLORIDA

Bass, Mountain Parks, Indian Dances, Considered

Readers of the Boston Herald were puzzled at first to know what to make of the subhead but, schooled by long practice to deal with such typographical vagaries, they quickly saw that the line of small type belonged under a headline farther down the page:

SPRING HELPS OUTDOOR BILLS PASS CONGRESS

What difference, after all, did it make where the editor printed that line about the bass and the Indian dances? Anyone but a fool could see that bass and Indian dances had nothing to do with the death of a famous man like Thomas Mott Osborne. Fortifying, with this reflection, their faith in the infallibility of their chosen newspaper, subscribers of the Boston Herald read on:

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., May 13 (AP) -- Thomas Mott Osborn, 80, for more than a quarter of a century warden of Sing Sing prison, N. Y., died here late today. He had been ill for several weeks.

Mr. Osborn until recently was an active figure in fraternal and civic affairs. He was a crusader for prison reform methods.

He is survived by his widow, a daughter, Mrs. Walter Clark and a son, Charles L. Osborn. The latter two of Jersey City, N. J.

The clipping, small as it was, gave many Bostonians something to talk about that morning. They were sorry that the Herald had not said more about such an interesting man. Some readers, indeed, claiming to have perused other accounts, described to their friends the scene at Mr. Osborne's deathbed, dealing in dramatic fashion with the pathetic figure of the aged warden, decrepit but courageous still, dying unattended. These glib ones might have been grateful if someone had warned them that even the Herald's two-inch notice (an Associated Press despatch) contained certain inaccuracies:

1) Thomas Mott Osborne was not 80 years old. He was 66.

2) He had not been warden of Sing Sing for a "quarter of a century." He had served at that prison for nearly two years.

3) He was not in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was in Boston.

4) He was alive. Next day the Boston Herald printed an editorial:

Mr. Osborne Alive

Our multitudinous apologies to Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne, now in this city, for printing on the front page yesterday morning an Associated Press despatch that contained about as many errors as it would be possible to compress in the short space it occupied. . . .

Also it printed on page 2 another item:

George C. Osborne ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., May 14 (AP) -- George C. Osborne, 80, well known prison reform advocate and for 10 years warden at the New Jersey penitentiary, died here late yesterday.

During Mr. Osborne's tenure as warden of the New Jersey prison he abolished the lockstep, instituted a parole system and made other radical changes in prison regulations.

Said the editor of the Herald (R. L. O'Brien) in commenting on his editorial: "We were in error . . . . The Associated Press corrected the original story with great promptness."

Religious Hoax

No matter what the scantiness of news may be, newspapers these days almost never publish a hoax. The joke may be widely enjoyable.

But a patiently built-up reputation for accuracy and reliability may be thus endangered, for to most readers the newspaper is a gospel of facts.

An account like the circumstantially detailed story of an Indian massacre of Manhattan citizens, published a few years ago in Figaro, the French weekly, is inconceivable in the U. S.

Sometimes, however, an editor is so irritated by the constant piracy of his news by some competitor, that he deliberately lays a trap for the rascal in the form of a false report. Here Melville Stone's* foiling of the old Chicago Post and Mail 50 years ago is the classic model. Mr. Stone, then part owner and editor of the Chicago Daily News, printed a false despatch about some fictitiously sad distress in Serbia and ran in some supposedly Serbian words, "Er us siht la Etsll iws nel lum cmeht," as meaning, "The municipality cannot aid." The Post and Mail, owned by the McMullen brothers, promptly stole the story in toto, were chagrined to have all Chicago told that the "Serbian" phrase was the printing in reverse of, "The McMullens will steal this sure."

An exasperated editor might perpetrate a hoax of this sort. But he will never meddle with a religious subject. That was left to a Canadian Modernist during the ten-day session of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association at Toronto the beginning of the month. W. Harold Young, a Canadian correspondent of the Christian Century, gleefully tells the story in the current issue of that periodical.

A few years ago a Toronto writer faked a story of the discovery by two Swedish scientists, Drs. Smierkase and Butterbrod, of the skeleton of a fish large enough to have swallowed Jonah. Toronto papers refused the yarn, for "Smierkase" and "Butterbrod" too transparently mean "soft cheese" and "butter bread." However, at the Fundamentalist convention, the clever writer found his opportunity, sent the manuscript without comment to a Dr. Brown, who based his main argument for the authenticity of the Jonah story on this "discovery." Toronto papers this time reported Dr. Brown and his "proof." Then they were told of the hoax. Dr. Brown went away from there.

"Meanwhile," concludes the Christian Century's correspondent, "the fundamentals convention, albeit walking a little lame, pursued its militant way and wound up in a blaze of defiant glory."

*Melville Elijah Stone (born 1848) founded the Chicago Daily News in 1875. Victor Fremont Lawson, who died last summer, was long his partner and close friend. Mr. Stone was general manager of the Associated Press from 1893 to 1921. Since then he has been its counselor. He has been the confidant of presidents and kings, has always been well liked and respected.