The genius who devised this macabre lottery is unknown, at least to me, but he did have an original idea. He chose 100 persons of some prominence, people important enough to merit newspaper obituaries at death, and he wrote their names on individual slips of paper, folded them and put them in a hat. Then he went through the plant — the city room, sports department, composing room, business office, and so on — and for a dollar's initial contribution, each participant picked a name out of the hat.

     You kept the name you'd obtained for an indefinite period, but each week you paid in another dollar. The pot thus grew bigger each week, and the players in the game kept studying the obituary columns, because the winner would be the person holding the slip on which was written the name of the first one of the 100 prominent persons to die.

     I forgot to say above that no superannuated crocks were among those listed; all were middle-aged or thereabouts. So there were no deaths for a long time and the story I heard years ago is that the pool added to nearly $7,000 when it was finally won.

     And two of the gamblers split the pot — because nobody knows even today whether Wiley Post or Will Rogers died first in that plane crash in Alaska.

     Because we know that Post and Rogers crashed on August 15, 1935, we can date the pool's end. If the amount of cash is close to correct, the pool probably originated in 1934. As for Post and Rogers, their crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, shook the nation. Post was a very famous aviator — the first man to fly solo around the world — and Will Rogers was a beloved humorist, famous on stage, radio, the silver screen and the pages of the daily newspaper.

     More recently, dead pools gained greater public awareness with The Dead Pool, a 1988 Warner Brothers film produced by and starring Clint Eastwood, written by Steve Sharon, from a story by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw. "Dirty Harry" Callahan (Eastwood) talks to a film director named Peter Swan (Liam Neeson) about a 'death list' with a dead rock star on it. Appropriately enough, the conversation takes place in a cemetery. Swan says, "It's no big secret... The Dead Pool is just a harmless game." To which Callahan replies, "Sounds pretty sick to me."