Exit Smiling

As country editor and city reporter, Kansas-born Forrest Warren had done his share of picture-chasing and interviewing on stories of sudden death. Then, in 1913, his wife was killed by a train, and another reporter came to interview him. Warren decided that he wanted nothing more to do with that sort of work, promised himself to try instead to write things to make people happy.

In 1926, Warren took his three children and his second wife to California, landed a job on the San Diego Union. From then on, he made a career of helping others.

His folksy, sentimental column, "Half Minute Interviews," became San Diego's clearing house for good works. He raised $40,000 to buy shoes for needy youngsters, rounded up 600 wheelchairs for cripples, organized an annual Santa Helper campaign to provide money, clothes and toys, ran a depression Job-Finding Club, bought Seeing Eye dogs for the blind, found homes for orphaned children.

Warren launched a Golden Wedding Club to counteract the divorce wave, borrowed graduation dresses for high-school girls who could not afford them, helped raise $55,000 for a clubhouse for the Indoor Sports, an organization of shut-ins. He became San Diego's best-known newspaperman, and one of its best-loved citizens. Four years ago, when the rival Journal hired him away from the Union, hundreds of readers came with him to follow his new column, "People We Know."

Last May, ill and bedridden at 71, Warren calmly dictated a column to his wife: "I have cancer and I am going to die of it." Warren told his readers that he had already arranged for his funeral, but hoped that they would pay their respects while he was still alive--by contributing to cancer research. In nickels, dimes and dollars, $32,000 poured in.

Then Forrest Warren wrote his last column, marked it "hold for release," sent it to the Journal to be run when he died. It ran last week. Across Page One, the Journal spread Forrest Warren's goodbye and "God bless you" to his San Diego friends, who had taught him, he wrote, that "people are still interested in helping their neighbors." Two days later in Balboa Park, 2,000 friends attended his funeral. As Forrest Warren had requested, the preacher kept his remarks brief.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.