Jane Ace - Death

Death

Jane Ace died in New York City in 1974 from cancer, aged 77. Goodman Ace composed a eulogy in a Saturday Review column:

Now alone at a funeral home ... the questions ... the softly spoken suggestions ... repeated, and repeated ... because... because during all the arrangements, through my mind there ran a constant rerun, a line she spoke on radio ... on the brotherhood of man ... in her casual, malapropian style ... "we are all cremated equal" ... they kept urging for an answer ... a wooden casket?... a metal casket?... it's the name of their game ... a tisket, a casket ... and then transporting it to Kansas City, Missouri ... the plane ride ... "smoking or non-smoking section?" somebody asked... the non-thinking section was what I wanted ... a soft sprinkle of snow as we huddled around her ... the first of the season, they told me ... lasted only through the short service ... snow stopped the instant the last words were spoken. He had the grace to celebrate her arrival with a handful of His confetti ...

That eulogy provoked hundreds of letters from current readers and old radio fans alike. With several hundred episodes of Easy Aces now circulating among old-time radio collectors (episodes the Aces syndicated through the Frederick W. Ziv Company in 1945), Jane Ace has been discovered by fans who weren't even alive before her own death. The National Radio Hall of Fame helped make sure of that, inducting Easy Aces and its co-stars in 1990.