Move on.(CITY DESK)(newspaper Master's Voice )(Essay)

A MORGUE is a place where bodies are stored; a newspaper's morgue is a place where clippings are filed. Bodies lie in a morgue temporarily, awaiting burial; clippings are not buried, but slumber in their folders until the moment when someone wants to hear their stories.

The Master's Voice has been publishing out of a building on West 43rd Street for almost a century. During that time, different aspects of its operations have moved here and there within the structure. Most of the morgue now rests below ground, in the vast basement caverns that once held the printing presses. I was given a tour of the morgue by one of its caretakers, whom I had met at a party.

Fourteen hundred metal filing cabinets hold the morgue. Each drawer contains a double row of folders. Some are slim in their reticence, while others burst with detail. The cataloguing system is peculiar, converting the alphabet into numbers. Heaven help the file that is returned to the wrong drawer; only divine providence could find it then.

I was told that the Master's Voice morgue runs up to 1990, when the computer storage of information took over. So 20-year-old goatees can look up anything from the middle of the first Bush administration on. Famous older people and events have also made the transition to pixels; type in "Thomas Jefferson Papers," and up they come, everything the Library of Congress holds, in the original handwriting. Try to do that with your letter-copying machine, Mr. President. But what about the obscure? Francesco Caruso, for instance. In 1927 Caruso was a 35-year-old laborer living on Third Street in Brooklyn. One of his six children got a sore throat. A doctor diagnosed diphtheria and prescribed an injection. Nevertheless, the child died. When the doctor returned the next day, Caruso strangled him in a rage. He was sentenced to fry, but the Italian-American community rallied round. Rep. Fiorello LaGuardia got into the act; Clarence Darrow was consulted; there were calls for a retrial. All of it is told, in the jumpy day-to-dayness of clippings, some of them from Master's Voice ("Physician Is Slain by Crazed Father as Boy Patient Dies"), others from New York newspapers that are themselves dead and gone.

Francesco Caruso is actually a bad example of obscurity, since Master's Voice just ran a story on his last living descendant, which is why my guide had the file out. (Caruso was convicted of manslaughter in a second trial, served six years, and died in 1968.) But there were thousands of other files, other stories. These many crowded about me.

Italian troops in China in 1931. They look out from under odd-shaped helmets; blurry figures in the background might be Chinese. Evidently it was some international peacekeeping operation; Mussolini must have been pretending to be a good guy that year. Imagine if they had stayed: Italian/Chinese food. A wildlife expedition to British East Africa. I try to recall my days as a boy stamp collector: George VI looking at giraffes. ...