A NAME IN THE NEWS - AT 8:05 A.M. ET:  Howard Unruh has died.  Now, most readers have never heard that name, or may confuse it with the prominent Unruh family of past California politics.

But Howard Unruh was a killer.  On one day in 1949, in Camden, New Jersey, he gunned down a group of his neighbors in a crime that stunned the nation.

For members of the profession of journalism, of a certain age, though, Howard Unruh gave his name to one of the great pieces of reporting in American history.  When I was a student at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, decades ago, we studied the report of the Unruh killings written by Meyer "Mike" Berger of The New York Times, a report that won a Pulitzer Prize:

CAMDEN, N.J., Sept.6--Howard B. Unruh, 28 years old, a mild, soft-spoken veteran of many armored artillery battles in Italy, France, Austria, Belgium and Germany, killed twelve persons with a war souvenir Luger pistol in his home block in East Camden this morning. He wounded four others.

Unruh, a slender, hollow-cheeked six-footer paradoxically devoted to scripture reading and to constant practice with firearms, had no previous history of mental illness but specialists indicated tonight that there was no doubt that he was a psychiatric case, and that he had secretly nursed a persecution complex for two years or more.

Mike Berger was a reporter.  He wasn't a "journalist."  He became legendary for his ability to quickly, and quietly, gather the facts of a story and present them, in a neutral way, to the public.  I have no idea what his politics were.  As a reader, I wasn't supposed to know. 

Those of us who were on The New York Times were proud to be associated, in any way, with the name of Meyer Berger...even those of us who arrived too late to know him.

He left school at 13.  He was educated in the streets and in sweaty city rooms.  He proved that you don't have to wave an Ivy League diploma to be wise, erudite, and reflective.  He wrote beautifully, in that style of a great reporter who took himself out of the story, yet could make you feel it:

The first war dead from Europe came home yesterday. The harbor was steeped in Sabbath stillness as they came in on the morning tide in 6,248 coffins in the hold of the transport Joseph V. Connolly. One coffin, borne from the ship in a caisson, moved through the city's streets to muffled drumbeats and slow cadenced marches, and 400,000 New Yorkers along the route and at a memorial service in Central Park paid it the tribute of reverent silence and unhidden tears…

Mike Berger would answer his phone at The Times with "Balloon tires."  It infuriated the publisher, who had enough sense not to do anything about his annoyance with Berger's irreverence.

We need reporters like Meyer Berger today.  We don't have many of them.  Today we have "journalists," which is one reason why newspapers are in such trouble.  You can always tell when a profession is dying by the way it changes its labeling to puff itself up.  Reporters become journalists.  Movies become "film" or "cinema."  Newspapers are dying, and so is Hollywood.

So Howard Unruh finally passed on.  Mike Berger left us in 1959.  It is Mike Berger who'll be remembered.

October 20,  2009