The Melancholy Don

The haughty little magazines and the anthologists never knew him, and would have ignored him if they had. But all their Rapunzel-haired poets together never spoke to an audience the size of his. And when he died last .week, the New York Times obit said of Philip Stack: "He was rated the leader in his art." It was a lowly art: he was the nameless mass-producer of saccharine sentiments on millions of greeting cards. For Walter Winchell's millions of readers he penned disillusioned doggerel under the pseudonym "Don Wahn." But his real name was familiar to the Esquire oglers who glanced at the jingles under Varga's flesh-tinted cuties.

Philip Stack was a gas-company clerk when he sent his first shy offerings to Winchell. Winchell all but scared Stack away by giving him a byline. After that Stack was billed as the Melancholy Don, Kid Kazanova, Don Wahn, or Donna Wahnna --all trademarks of a kind of heartburn that became a regular Winchell symptom. Winchell never got a bill from him, never paid him and never met him, but the verses got Stack his greeting-card job.

He cranked out his sweet-&-sour rhymes for 25 years, not even pausing at the death of his son (1942) and his first wife (in childbirth, two years later). Lately he seemed to tire of his monotonous Muse; in January Donna Wahnna wrote:

Now he's been writing verse for years and years,

So it can't be an adolescent pain, And although at times he moves the mob to tears

He must be sick of walking Heartbreak Lane.

Last week, the rhymester, 47, wrote a suicide note leaving his worldly goods to his second wife. Then he jumped from his 12th-floor Manhattan studio. Don Wahn's last heartbroken lines appeared a day later:

This is a world of never-ending strife, Dreams are a one-way passage out of life!

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