Jerome Irving Rodale, was a playwright, editor, author, and founder of Rodale, Inc. He was one of the first advocates of a return to sustainable agriculture and organic farming in the United States. He founded a publishing empire, founded several magazines, and published many books on health. He also published works on a wide variety of other topics, including The Synonym Finder. Rodale popularized the term “organic” to mean grown without pesticides.

Rodale had an interest in promoting a healthy and active lifestyle that emphasized organically grown foods. He was the founder of Rodale Press and publisher of Organic Farming and Gardening magazine starting in 1942.

One of Rodale’s most successful projects was Prevention Magazine, founded in 1950, which promotes preventing disease rather than trying to cure it later. It pioneered the return to whole grains, unrefined sweets, using little fat in food preparation, seldom eating animal products, herbal medicines, and breastfeeding. It also promoted consuming more than typical amounts of nutritional supplements and forgoing nicotine and caffeine.

Rodale, at the age of 72, had bragged during his just-completed interview on The Dick Cavett Show that “I’m in such good health that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday and I laughed all the way”, “I’ve decided to live to be a hundred”, and “I never felt better in my life!”; and still on stage seated next to the active interviewee, New York Post columnist Pete Hamill. According to Cavett, Hamill noticed something was wrong with Rodale, leaned over to Cavett, and said, “This looks bad.” According to others, Cavett asked, “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?”

Rodale had died of a heart attack on stage and in front of the live audience. The show was never broadcast to the public.

A few decades ago, Halloween decor amounted to a lone jack-o-lantern left grinning in a home’s window as a welcome to trick-or-treaters. More recently, that aspect of the annual event has been elevated to dizzying displays of orchestrated spectacle even as trick or treating has dwindled to the merest trickle in some areas.   Having become accustomed to over-the-top Halloween ornamentation and even inured to it, in October 2005, passersby mistook a suicide by hanging for a prop.

On 26 October 2005, the corpse of a 42-year-old woman was left suspended in public view for hours inFrederica,Delaware, because her lifeless body was assumed to be yet another Halloween display. The unnamed woman hung herself from a tree located across a moderately busy road from some homes. Her body, suspended about 15 feet above the ground, could easily be seen from passing vehicles.

State police spokesman Cpl. Jeff Oldham and neighbors said people noticed the body around7:30that morning but dismissed it as a holiday prank. Authorities arrived at the scene at11:00to begin the process of examining the scene and removing the body. The deceased lived about a quarter-mile from where her body was discovered.

Similarly, in mid-October 2009 the decomposing body of a 75-year-old suicide victim sat undisturbed on the balcony of the deceased’s home in Marina del Rey, California, for several days because neighbors assumed it was merely part of a Halloween display:

Mostafa Mahmoud Zayed had apparently been dead for three days with a single gunshot wound to one eye. He was slumped over a chair on the third-floor balcony of his apartment onBora Bora Way, said cameraman Austin Raishbrook, who was on the scene when authorities were alerted to the body.

Neighbors told Raishbrook that they noticed the body but didn’t bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy. “The body was in plain view of the entire apartment complex and they all didn’t do anything,” Raishbrook said. “It’s very strange. It did look unreal, to be honest.”

An investigator with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said the case is an “apparent suicide,” and declined to comment further.