[Typewritten carbon, blue-paper, with red editor's marks and personal pencil annotations. Typed on a Royal No. 10.]

THE BEACON — CITY DESK — S. PELLMAN. FILED 19/9/1919. SLATED 21/9.

[red pencil: KILLED 9/22. — BND]

A QUIETER OBITUARY FOR MR. THORPE

The life of Cornelius Albright Thorpe, the industrialist who died on the 12th of September at his Crescent residence, was memorialized in full in the pages of this paper on the 14th and the 15th. The present article does not revisit those considerable achievements. It is a quieter piece, about the kind of death Mr. Thorpe died and the kind of quiet his household has kept since.

Mr. Thorpe was sixty-four years old and in vigorous if not perfect health. His physician, Dr. David Linden, whose practice is among the most respected in the Crescent, attended him during the brief illness preceding his collapse — an acute indigestion reported first on the 7th — and through the evening of the 12th. The cause of death appears on the county record as heart failure.

It is not the Beacon's purpose here to question Dr. Linden's finding. Dr. Linden is a physician of standing, and the symptoms he describes are familiar in a man of Mr. Thorpe's years and habits. We wish only to note, for the record, certain features of the period immediately preceding Mr. Thorpe's death that will strike readers familiar with the Thorpe household as worthy of remark. [red pencil: "you WISH TO NOTE — reword, too close"]

In the week before his death, Mr. Thorpe is known to have summoned his personal attorney, Mr. Charles Reddick, and to have requested a meeting of the Blackwell Iron Works Board of Directors — a meeting that had been scheduled for the 4th of October and was to have addressed, we are told by a person close to the Thorpe household who is not willing to be named, "certain irregularities in the Company's accounts." The substance of those irregularities has not been disclosed. The meeting, of course, did not occur.

Mr. Thorpe's eldest son, Julian Thorpe, succeeded to the presidency of Blackwell Iron Works without opposition upon the reading of the will on the 18th. Blackwell is a company of means. The succession is, in the way of these things, orderly.

Before his death Mr. Thorpe made his own preparations in the matter of his household's immediate needs. He had, it is reported, given instruction to Mrs. Thorpe and to his daughter Mrs. Callisher with regard to one or two private disbursements on the morning of the 12th. His mood that day is described by the household staff as preoccupied.

We are told that Miss Stefania Pytel, R.N., of Port Hume General Hospital, attended the deceased in his final hour, at Dr. Linden's request, and was of material assistance. [red pencil circled, with a line to margin reading "CUT — not a story beat, dragging the hospital into this"] Miss Pytel has declined to be interviewed.

This paper is confident that the Thorpe family is secure in Julian Thorpe's hands and that Blackwell will continue in the good order that has characterized it under three generations. It notes only that the death of a great man, when it comes at a juncture, produces in the minds of thoughtful citizens a natural wish to understand the juncture. There is nothing, in this case, to understand that is not already on the record.

[red pencil, bottom: "This one I can't let you file, Sarah. Not this paragraph, not any paragraph. Let the man be buried. — BND"]

[pencil at very bottom, Pellman's hand: "He did not let me let it go."]