Death at the Wheel

Traffic safety is a subject which most newspapers regard as worthy but unexciting. But it has long been a favorite topic in the New York Daily News. For nine years Cartoonist Clarence Daniel Batchelor has drawn a macabre series of traffic don'ts called Inviting the Undertaker. The subject was closer than ever to Publisher Joseph M. Patterson's heart after the Sunday afternoon in 1939 when his brilliant managing editor, Harvey Deuell, suffered a heart attack while driving to work, swerved his car into a cable fence and was killed.

One morning last week the News ran its 264th Inviting the Undertaker. The cartoon combined two pet Patterson themes: safety, and hatred of the Roosevelts (it showed a tombstone, though no one had been seriously hurt when Eleanor Roosevelt dozed at the wheel and smashed into two cars--TIME, Aug. 26.)

On a winding Connecticut highway, an hour and a half after the final edition closed, Roy Coleman Holliss, 56-year-old acting president of the News Syndicate Co., was killed in a wreck.

Roy Holliss had seen the birth of the News, had fought an uphill battle to convince advertisers that it was respectable to buy space in a tabloid.

For the second time in three months, the biggest paper in the U.S. was left without a president. For the time being the editorial side, the late Joe Patterson's favorite but a foreign territory to Adman Holliss, would stay in the steady hands of Executive Editor Richard Clarke, 50 son of the News's first managing editor.

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