He was born in Urumiah, Persia, on February 4, 1852, being the son of the Rev. Austin H. Blank, a missionary. He was graduated from Dartmouth in 1873, and that college awarded him the degrees of A. M. in 1876 and LL.D. in 1901. From 1876 to 1878 he studied at Leipzig University. He was assistant professor of ancient languages at the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College from 1873 to 1876, associate professor of Greek at Dartmouth from 1878 to 1880, and dean of the collegiate board and professor of classical philology at Johns Hopkins in 1886 and 1887. In 1906 and 1907 he served as professor in the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
(Then follows a list of the organizations of which he was a member and the periodicals with which he was connected.)
He married Miss Mary Blank, daughter of the president of Blank College, in 1879, and she survives him.—New York Tribune.
The obituary usually ends with a list of surviving relatives—especially children and very often the funeral arrangements are included. This is the last paragraph of another obituary:
His first wife, Mary V. Blank, died in 1872. Three years later he married Mrs. Sarah A. Blank, of Hightstown, N. J., who with four daughters, survives him. The funeral will be held tomorrow at 11:30 o'clock. The burial will be in the family plot in Greenwood Cemetery.
This is the standard form of the obituary which is followed by most daily newspapers in fair-sized cities. The form is characterized by an extreme conciseness and brevity and an absolutely impersonal tone. Very rightly, an obituary is handled with a sense of the sanctified character of its subject It offers no opportunity for fine writing or human interest; it simply gives the facts as briefly and impersonally as possible.
XIV
SPORTING NEWS
Division of labor on the larger American newspapers has made the reporting of athletic and sporting events into a separate department under a separate editor. The pink or green sporting sheets of the big papers have become separate little newspapers in themselves handled by a sporting editor and his staff and entirely devoted to athletic news, except when padded out with left-over stories from other pages. Although on smaller papers any reporter may be called upon to cover an athletic event, in the cities such news is handled entirely by experts who are thoroughly acquainted with all phases of the athletic sports about which they write. The stories on the pink sheet enjoy the greatest unconventionality of form to be seen anywhere in the paper except on the editorial page. And yet, because athletic reporters are usually men taken from regular reporting and because the same ideas and necessities of news values govern the sporting pages, athletic stories follow, in general, the usual news story form.