These guys, all of whom are now dead, used to come to my attention because I got to edit their columns for the off edit page or the op edit page, as it sometimes is known, the page opposite a newspaper's editorial page.

This page, so newspaper publishers believe, gives the paper a chance to publish differing opinions.

I say I got to edit these columnists, but that's probably stretching things a little. All of the columnists were syndicated, that is, they wrote in one place—usually New York—and the syndicate sent their columns either by teletype or snail mail to papers who subscribed to the syndicate's services.

One of the columnists who arrived by teletype was Hal Boyle, who wrote a column for many years for the Associated Press, the news service that still sends a constant stream of news to papers across the country. Boyle had been a war correspondent during World War II and he liked to advertise himself as "Happy Hal, the Arab's pal," in memory of his days in North Africa. (He also served in other parts of the war but was never as famous as Ernie Pyle.)

Boyle survived the war (Pyle did not) and ended up in the New York AP office, where he was supposed to write a daily column to be sent out over the AP wire five days a week. As anyone who has written a column will tell you, writing that frequently strains one's ability to invent. It certainly strained Boyle's. He claimed he was the world's champion fly watcher, meaning he spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling trying to think of things to write about.

Usually once a week he wrote about opening his mail. He also had a column every couple of weeks that purported to be the comments of a "curbstone Plato," philosophical meanderings that filled the space he had to fill but did little to illuminate the world.

But Boyle stayed away from politics. Not so a number of other columnists of the time, as, for example, Henry McLemore, who wrote for what was then United Press, AP's rival wire service, and Westbrook Pegler.

Pegler, once called a "stuck whistle," hated the New Deal and especially Eleanor Roosevelt; just why was not clear. Pegler could turn a really nasty insult and often did, but he apparently never dented Mrs. Roosevelt or her reputation. She wrote her own column, "My Day," and never admitted Pegler even existed.

But my greatest discovery among this stable of columnists I never met in person was Dr. George Crane. Dr. Crane (just where his doctorate came from was uncertain) offered a daily collection of quasi-psychological advice, somewhat like Dr. Laura Schlesinger.

Dr. Crane arrived mimeographed in the mail. That didn't really matter, however, because time was not a factor in Dr. Crane's advice. It was written to fit most any time or situation.

Dr. Crane had several core components to his advice. One, for instance, was that husbands should every so often give their wives what he called "a movie kiss." I'm not sure what this was supposed to mean, but let us say it meant more than a peck on the cheek.

He also was convinced that bed-wetting could be cured. Just why he thought this a major problem among his readers I never was able to determine, but if you sent him a dime (things were cheaper then), he would send you a pamphlet describing how to build a device that would administer a slight shock if you, or more likely, your child wet the bed.

I was always tempted to send in for the pamphlet just to see what the device was like, even though I never had a problem with wetting the bed, nor did my children.

Dr. Crane also had what seemed to me to be an overextended sense of optimism. Everything would always turn out all right. He found some good in everything, even when his son was killed in an airplane crash.

I read a lot of Dr. Crane columns in my time as an editor—and I really didn't. But that didn't make much difference. The only complaint we ever received about Dr. Crane came tongue in cheek from a reader who said he had learned that someone at the syndicate had discovered some years ago a collection of filing cabinets filled with Crane columns that they had been sending us ever since.

There really was no Dr. Crane, so this reader contended. The syndicate just kept recycling the columns.

It could be.

Anyway, Dr. Crane and Hal Boyle and Henry McLemore and Westbrook Pegler, and even Eleanor Roosevelt, have all gone to the Great City Room in the sky where there are no deadlines, every column gets published and one never runs out of things to write about.

And I'm still watching flies on the ceiling.