Then again, you might not be surprised at all.

At one of my first newspaper jobs, way back in the early 1970s, the newsroom had an office pool going on. Everybody put up a few dollars for the opportunity to predict when Mamie Eisenhower was going to die.

Why Mamie Eisenhower?

I truly don't know.

Mamie was one of those quiet, husband-adoring first ladies who had far more influence on ladies' fashions than on foreign policy. Her husband, Ike, the former general, was a popular two-term president who died in 1969.

As far as anyone knew, Mamie was in pretty good health. Why would anyone suggest something so offensive as an office pool speculating on her demise?

Perhaps it was the perverse morbidity of that sort of thing that appealed to those ink-stained wretches. Remember, this was back when cigarette smoke filled the newsroom, and more than a few desk drawers contained ever-dissipating bottles of scotch.

I have no idea who won the Mamie Eisenhower sweepstakes. The lady survived until 1979, outliving at least a couple of the pool participants.

I had gone on to another newspaper by then, but the same sort of mordant humor was present there and in every other place where I've put subject and verb together.

The common wisdom — an oxymoron if I've ever used one — is that newspaper folks come into contact with intolerable heartache, death and pathos every day.

If we acted like "normal" human beings, with proper compassion and sympathy, we would all wind up in padded rooms, pounding on imaginary typewriters and yelling for more carbon paper.

So instead, we develop mental scabs, and sometimes it's not pretty.

One of the nicest colleagues I ever worked with once bounced happily over to my office with a huge smile on her face.

"Guess," she gushed, "who died?"

It was a national politician for whom she had a particular dislike.

"Get ahold of yourself," I said. "A man is dead."

She frowned at me, as if to call me a party-pooper. Later, she realized how absurd she had sounded, and in the weeks and months afterward, we would kid her about it every time some other politician shuffled off this mortal coil.

Anyone's death, of course, diminishes us all. Any callousness, we insist, is a defense mechanism, a release. If it sounds like a cheesy excuse for unforgivable behavior, consider that as I'm writing this, a quick peek at the national news wire includes the following:

• It was revealed that a 9-year-old boy in Columbus, Ohio, was electrocuted because a lamppost wasn't properly grounded.

• A videotape shows that a woman who died in a "Toughman" amateur boxing contest in St. Petersburg, Fla., in front of her horrified children had been allowed to be pummeled by her opponent even when the overweight mom had given up and was helpless.

• In Mineola, N.Y., a man was found guilty of killing a priest and a parishioner during a Mass.

• A medical examiner testified in a Fort Worth, Texas, trial that a pedestrian lived for two hours while impaled on the car windshield of a woman who just let him die after hitting him.

And that's just a glance at one source. Stories about AIDS ravaging Africa, civil war in Liberia, turmoil in Iraq, etc., etc., etc., are all there on the international wire and must be dealt with by every daily newspaper.

The worst, of course, is when something terrible happens locally, to our neighbors. There is never any newsroom levity when painful things occur close to home, but you're also a professional with a job to do and personal feelings must be set aside until after deadline.

It's no excuse, of course, for insensitivity. Truth be known, most reporters, photographers and copy editors show their human compassion every day, but if your heart bled for every outrage, for every child's suffering, you would have to change professions or reserve one of those padded rooms I mentioned earlier.

It's my opinion that newspaper folks these days tend to be more aware of propriety than their forbears were. I don't know of any Mamie Eisenhower-style pools going on now, but I wouldn't be surprised if there happened to be one or two for Osama bin Laden.

Managing Editor Cary Brunswick and I have this rueful little exercise we sometimes indulge in when someone we think is famous dies. We're each older than 50, and we make gentlemen's bets about whether some of our younger colleagues have heard of this person or the other.

Cary usually wagers that most of them will know who the recently deceased was.

Cary usually loses the bet.

The latest subject was racist Lester Maddox, who chased blacks from his fried chicken restaurant in Atlanta in 1964, the day after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. He closed and then sold his restaurant rather than serve blacks.

Then, he got elected governor of Georgia.

He was a symbol of the despicable good ol' boy South, a hero to bigots and despised by everyone else.

Maddox died of cancer at age 87 Wednesday. When Cary and I did an informal survey of our young newsroom people, hardly any of them had heard of Lester.

He had long been swept off the national stage and into history's dustbin, where he so rightfully belonged.

If that appears callous and insensitive, perhaps I'm in the right profession.

Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 441-7208.