Mike Coakley, newsman

HOW DO YOU FIND a casket on short notice? For Mike Coakley, nothing to it.

Mike had a reputation at the Inquirer and the old Evening Bulletin as a man who loved a good practical joke.

But he was foremost one of the best newsapaper rewritemen in the city's journalism history, a man who could take notes from a reporter - or several reporters - and craft a sharply written story for the front page, containing all the facts and presented in a compelling style.

And quickly.

The old saying that newspapers produced literature in a hurry was the abiding standard of papers when people relied on them to give them the news.

And Mike belonged to that era. He came in at the tail end of it, but he carried on the tradition, leaving the profession before the present time when people are bombarded from every direction by more information than they want or need.

"He was born about 30 years too late," said former colleague Michael D. Schaffer, now the Inquirer's book and TV editor. "He belonged to the age of paste pots and newsrooms with linoleum floors and old Underwoods."

Michael B. Coakley III, who retired from the Inquirer in 2005 after 24 years on the paper, a personable guy with a quirky sense of humor that manifested in numerous newsroom pranks over the years, died Tuesday of complications of Alzheimer's disease. He was 69 and lived in Blackwood, Camden County.

About that casket.

The Inquirer's night rewrite staff, a collection of jokesters who kept the often-stodgy publication lively, wanted the casket for a skit they wanted to perform on the occasion of the departure of foreign correspondent Richard Ben Cramer.

Needless to say, funeral directors refused to lend coffins that they would need for funerals. However, Mike found a funeral director in Trenton who was willing to provide a "transfer case," a casket used to move bodies to other parts of the country.

The skit was successful and the transfer case ended up for months in the office of James Naughton, the assistant managing editor who hired Mike.

"People who wanted to be hired would sit in my office and look warily at the casket," Naughton said. "If they still wanted to be hired after that, they were good candidates."

One of the butts of the nightside jokers was their boss, the late Mike "The Commodore" Comerford. The staff enjoyed tormenting Comerford with a variety of pranks, including the time they convinced him that he had won $58 million in a lottery.

Comerford marched into Naughton's office and quit. When he realized that the expected fortune was just a gag, he had to retract his resignation. Naughton, let in on the joke, at first refused to accept the retraction.

"We used to talk about the Commodore's 'redness meter,' " said Robert W. Fowler, who worked on rewrite with Mike. "The more upset he got, the redder he got."

"Mike [Coakley] was certainly a character," Fowler said. "He was great to work with."

Tom Torok, who worked with Mike at the Inquirer and is now projects editor at the New York Times, said Mike was a "premier rewriteman. He could write about anything that came down the pike, and do it expertly. He was a master wordsmith."

"That line, 'Get me rewrite,' should have been, 'Get me Coakley,' " said Schaffer. "Mike never left the building, but he could take phone calls from reporters in the field and reconstruct a scene as memorably - and accurately - as if he'd been there."

An example of Mike's prowess on the keyboard was when he took notes from various reporters in the high-tension atmosphere of the MOVE disaster in 1985, and pounded out the lead story for a special edition.

Mike Coakley was born in West Philadelphia, but his family moved to New Jersey in his childhood. He attended Merchantville High School, where his early ambition was to be an archaeologist.

Fowler said Mike told him that when a counselor ridiculed his ambition and informed him that you had to be rich to get the college education you needed to be an archaelogist, Mike dropped out.

He volunteered for a time at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, "dusting mummies, or something," Fowler said.

Mike had a number of blue-collar jobs, including in construction and at a leather tannery, where he had to fight off hungry rats.

He made it into the newspaper business as a copyboy at the former Camden Courier-Post in 1964. He worked his way up to night rewrite, and won the 1968 Best Writing Award of the Philadelphia Press Association.

In 1968, he went to the old Evening Bulletin as a night rewriteman. He left the Bulletin in 1981, a year before it closed.

He is survived by his wife, A.J. There was no funeral service.