Timothy J. Wheeler, R.I.P.

TIM WHEELER wasn't a household name, even within the conservative movement. But a generation of NR readers took delight in his words, whether or not they knew the identity of their author. Tim was the king of the "offbeat paragraph"--the short items, sometimes political but often not, with which WFB, as editor, always began and ended the opening section of The Week.

"What, you ask, are the two greatest health problems among teenagers? Pregnancy and pimples, in that order. Now aren't you sorry you brought it up?"

"Three cosmonauts spent a record 238 days in the Salyut 7 space station, but were finally forced to return to the Soviet Union."

After the Mount St. Helens eruption: "I'm sorry I made an ash of myself. Lava, come back to me. Love, Helen."

And one of WFB's own favorites: "Iraq and the budget are as nothing compared to the firestorm following the retirement of maize, raw umber, lemon yellow, blue grey, violet blue, green blue, orange red, and orange and their replacement by vivid tangerine, wild strawberry, fuchsia, teal blue, cerulean, royal purple, jungle green, and dandelion, by the makers of Crayola crayons."

Tim had come to Bill's attention as a student journalist at the University of Wisconsin, where he was editor of Insight & Outlook--the first and one of the best conservative campus journals. He later founded a journal called Rally, sort of a triple-A farm team for NATIONAL REVIEW; many later-prominent conservative writers had their first pieces published in Rally.

Tim eventually moved to a farm in Indiana, from which he did editorial work for the Conservative Book Club and for Bill Rickenbacker's financial newsletter. He also produced a line of buttons and notepads of his own, with slogans like "Every joyous calorie cries Yea! to life," and "Ad Hoc Committee to Send the 20th Century Back to the Factory."

Tim seldom bylined, seldom spoke in public. But he was a steady sardonic libertarian presence at the Philadelphia Society and other right-wing gatherings, from which he will be sorely missed.