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Hotel Knickerbocker
New York City      
September 14, 1939 
 

  . . . I am composing one for Johnny. He and I went into a huddle yesterday and out of it came a theme for a title, DEATH’S DEPUTY. He and I threshed around until we got the idea of a man who officiates, all unwillingly, for the god of destruction. Without volition on his part he causes accidents. No blame can actually be traced to him but he is always, in some small way, responsible. Incidentally, the elimination of such “accident-prones” from large firms has appreciably diminished the accident toll. There are people, then, who seem to be magnets for destruction. Although rarely touched themselves, things happen all around them. One man in a trucking firm was on the scene of seven fatal accidents. As soon as he was removed from the firm the accidents ceased! And yet he had never been a direct or even indirect cause of those accidents so far as physical fact went. His helper, for instance, was in a truck body while this accident-prone stood on the walk. A man fell from the twenty-eighth floor and killed the helper. At another time a motorist ran thirty feet off a road just to strike this accident-prone’s truck and kill himself – with no damage to the accident-prone. Seven incidents like that, one after another and the jinx still follows. According to this, then, there is some basis for the maritime Jonah – and in the Navy there is a man who has survived every major sinking in the past twenty years! And was twice the sole survivor. . . . There are, then, men to whom accidents occur, affecting those in their vicinity. And such is the story DEATH’S DEPUTY. . . .

RON

Ron


 




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