As the end of the year approaches, we've been discussing whether it's worthwhile to do "Significant Deaths of 2008" story. A story like that is always full of surprises -- deaths you didn't notice during your busy lives, or those you overlooked for a myriad of reasons. Here's a fine story by former Post staff writer Bart Barnes that kicked off one such end-of-year compilation -- people still ask about this, which was headlined "You Really Have to Love Life to Write About Death Everyday."

Some major newspapers keep a running list on their website, something that we have not done yet, but perhaps with a bit of reader feedback we could convince the web producers to get underway.

Here's the question: Do you think it's worthwhile for us to pull together an end of the year list (linked, of course, to our obits) for the notable deaths of 2008 -- everyone from Sir Edmund Hillary to whomever steals the Christmas Day headline?

Two lefthanded baseball pitchers died this week, Preacher Roe and Herb Score. (Our obituary of Score isn't in the paper as of Nov. 12 because we didn't have enough space.)

Roe was a crafty pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers during their "Boys of Summer" glory days of the late 1940s and 1950s and helped pitch the Dodgers into three World Series. In 1951, he had a sensational record of 22-3, which is still the Dodgers' record for best winning percentage for a pitcher with 20 wins or more. Preacher was a colorful character from Arkansas who liked to pass himself off as a hayseed when, in fact, he was one of the few college-educated players of his era.

He was a promising pitcher who led the National Leauge in strikeouts in 1945 when he suffered a grievous injury -- a broken skull sustained during a fight at a girls' high school basketball game, of all places. He was terrible for a few years and was traded from Pittsburgh to Brooklyn, where his career blossomed. Throughout his career, Roe was suspected of being a spitballer, and he had an assortment of twitches, head swipes and deceptive motions that Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry would borrow in a later generation. Only after he retired did the old Preacher reveal that, yes, he did occasionally throw a wet one, which he called his "Beech-Nut slider." (Updated: In the obituary, I mentioned that the "Beech Nut" came from the gum Roe chewed. A reader has pointed out that it was also the name of a chewing tobacco, which makes more sense and would have produced more liquid for a spitball.)

Roe knew, of course, that it was the threat of the spitball more than the pitch itself that gave him his greatest over hitters. His best pitch was actually the humble chanegup.

Typically, Roe -- a raceonteur par excellence -- said that he had "a changeup, a changeup on my changeup and a changeup on the changeup of my changeup."

He pitched in three World Series but never on the winning side. He retired in 1954, one year before the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series.

Herb Score may be the greatest "what-might-have-been" story in baseball history. He was the American League rookie of the year in 1956, when he won 16 games for the Cleveland Indians, then won 20 games in the 1957 and led the league in strikeouts (as he had in his rookie season.) People who saw him pitch said he was bound for the Hall of Fame, unless something happened to derail his career.

Well, it did.

In May 1957, while pitching against the Yankees, the 23-year Score threw a low pitch to infielder Gil McDouglad, who lined it back toward the pitcher's mound. Score, who had an awkward pitching motion that left him vulnerable to batted balls, didn't see the ball off McDougald's bat until it was upon him.

It hit him flush in the right eye, tearing his eyelid, smashing his nose and breaking other bones in his face. (The best account of Score's career and that fateful night in 1957 appears in thhe Cleveland Plain Dealer.) Score missed the rest of the year and part of the 1958 season.

He tried to make a comeback but was never the same. He altered his pitching motion but couldn't recapture his earlier effectiveness and was a shadow of his former self. He retired from baseball at 28.

Score went on to a long career as a broadcaster for the Indians, but to this day his name makes baseball fans shake their heads in sad wonderment at the great career that never was.

Evocative story from CNN today about the last remaining veterans from the "war to end all wars."

Meanwhile, the war is still being fought in Verdun, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel allegedly "snubbing" a tribute to World War I soldiers after French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly changed the venue of the ceremony.

Perhaps the most horrifying war account of the day comes from the Miami Herald, which ran this obit for a disgraced Vietnam War vet.

The cultural critic John Leonard died Nov. 5 in New York. He had been many things, including book editor at The New York Times, author of a monthly column on books for Harper's Magazine, a television critic for New York magazine and a media critic for "CBS News Sunday Morning."

While at The Times, he was named chief cultural critic and his weekly column "Private Lives" offered social commentary through his lens as a divorced father in Manhattan. Sixty-nine of the columns were rounded up in book form as "Private Lives in the Imperial City" (1979).

Reviews were generally kind, each singing out his skill as a wordsmith, but critic Dennis Drabelle in The Washington Post found a "too-muchness." A reviewer for the Atlantic magazine found that Leonard's columns "sing variations on a single theme: the honor of parenthood, the courage of domesticity, the glory of ordinariness. Which is fine, and more than fine, except that the repeated celebration of one's own humility in the daily New York Times is a chancy proposition. It is not easy to be the Erma Bombeck of the Upper East Side."

But it was the learned and witty Mr. Leonard who managed to trump his critics with his own review in the Nation magazine.

"And so the Erma Bombeck of the Great Pickle Section of the New York Times sees fit to inflict on a hapless public sixty-nine of his Wednesday morning thumb-suckers," he wrote. "It was hard enough for some of us to work up much interest in his cats and his stoop and his coffee grinder and his fondue pot and his qualms on the first go-round; a book-length rerun is an exacerbation. One is tempted to suggest that he be sensitive on his own time, not ours."

One of the beauties of writing on the Web is that we can share links to research that we can't squeeze into the space that print permits. So it was with much delight that I was able to show links in the obit for Cecil Stoughton which revealed how he lost his job with the federal government. (I had just seen a rerun of his appearance on the Antiques Road Show so I knew who he was when we first got word of his death.)

Stoughton, for those of you who missed the story, was the White House photographer who shot the iconic photo of Lyndon B. Johnson taking the presidential oath of office aboard Air Force One after President John F. Kennedy's assassination. He also took lots of photos of the Kennedy family while JFK was in office.

But it was while he was working for the Park Service that he ran afoul of the Nixon administration.

Here's the Time magazine version of what happened when Stoughton donned his bargain-basement plaid jacket, a beaver hat and the red Park Service pass that gave him access to the inaugural platform in 1973.

The official photos of the second Nixon inaugural are in the National Archives and I've seen a copy of the contact sheet; time didn't permit us to request that one be scanned and posted online so I could link to it; however, someone else got a copy of it, which we linked to here, clearly showing Stoughton, his Nikon and his jacket (unfortunately, in black and white).

The Washington Post front-page photo of the day was unfortunately made from a different angle, so you can't see the errant shooter.

If you have ever been to Key West, capital of the Conch Republic, you probably have heard of Captain Tony Tarracino.

A saloonkeeper, boat captain, father of 13 and storyteller extraordinaire, his tales included running guns for Cuban mercenaries during the Bay of Pigs invasion. A B-movie, "Cuba Crossing," was made about him and island troubador Jimmy Buffett wrote a song, "Last Mango in Paris," based on his stories. When he was elected mayor of Key West in 1989, he said the hookers put him over the top -- an oft-neglected voting pool that today's candidates might do well to remember.

Captain Tony, who was 92, died Saturday.

Obama's grandmother died today, the day before the election .

First victim of the 2008 campaign; the 44-year-old Nevada state campaign director for Barack Obama dies of an apparent heart attack.

On Oct. 11, Jorg Haider, the longtime leader of a far-right political movement in Austria, died in an auto accident in his native country. I wrote an obituary of Haider on deadline for the next day's Post.

He was 58 and had regained a measure of power in Austrian parliamentary elections just two weeks before he died. In the 1990s, he had been one of the country's most powerful political figures, sparking an international backlash from nations that wanted to have nothing to do with a government leaning closer to Austria's not entirely resolved Nazi heritage. (Haider was a supporter of Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian president who had been exposed as a member of the Nazi army in World War II.)

I discovered many curious things about Haider, including the fact that both of his parents were members of the Nazi party and that he had expressed admiration for Hitler. Now, two weeks after Haider's death, an even more curious storyline has emerged. The Associated Press and New York Times have published stories suggesting that the macho symbol of Austria's return to traditional values might have been gay.

Haider was married and had two children, but his successor as leader of the right-wing Alliance for the Future of Austria is quoted by the Times saying, "Jörg and I were connected by something truly special. He was the man of my life."

From the AP story: "For decades, rumors had swirled that Haider might be gay. Some had even taken to calling his political bloc the "Boys' Party" because Haider's entourage often included a bevy of tanned young men."

Apparently, Haider had been drinking at a gay bar in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt -- the capital of the Carinthia region, of which Haider was governor -- shortly before he was in a high-speed crash.