Press: Undertakers’ Friend

Each year Philadelphia undertakers spend $175,000 of their clients’ money for paid death notices in the city’s four biggest papers. Just as regularly the Bulletin, Ledger and Inquirer divide $75,000 of this revenue while a $100,000 lump goes to the Record, mouthpiece of Julius David Stern, sonorous Jewish crusader for the New Deal in Philadelphia, New York and Camden.

It is no accident that the Record hogs Philadelphia’s death notice business. Most familiar newspaper figure to the city’s undertakers is the Record’s redhaired, beak-nosed Alexander Milligan Burns, who has made death notice selling his life work, has written 125,000 “finales” in 37 years. Mr. Burns helped initiate a novel co-operative deal by which a death notice placed in one Philadelphia paper is automatically placed in the other three, about half of the average $10 charge going to the paper which secures the original insertion. “Death Notice” Burns gets 80% of all original insertions because each morning he makes a shoptalk round of funeral parlors, calls morticians by their first names, after lunch goes to his Record desk where undertakers telephone a steady stream of death notices. Each evening he carefully follows every notice into the printed page, then trollies home at 1:15 a.m., sits up half-an-hour with a cigar for a final paternal check on the accuracy of the Record’s death notice column.

Last week “Death Notice” Burns slipped back into that quiet, inconspicuous pattern after an occasion of delightfully uncomfortable prominence. Prominent Publisher Stern had given a great banquet with no one else than his modest adman as guest of honor. The other guests were 260 local morticians. The menu on which they dined included filet mignon, four varieties of wine, champagne, liqueurs. Fussed and entirely too nervous to eat, Adman Burns bobbed around at the testimonial dinner while Boss Stern told undertakers: “You have made Philadelphia a better place to live in, and a better place to pass on in.”