We kind of fumbled our reporting of the death of actor Charlton Heston. At least for thousands of Post-Dispatch readers.

Word of Heston’s death moved late Saturday evening, and made it into many copies of the Sunday Post-Dispatch. But thousands of copies printed earlier didn’t have the obituary. And we failed to do a follow-up story in Monday or Tuesday papers. A number of readers have called me and the National desk to ask why. No good reason.

We have a remembrance planned for this Friday’s Screens section.

Here’s Sunday editor Ron Wade’s overnight note from Saturday, detailing the drill on getting the obit into some editions Sunday 4/6/08:

“Things were winding down tonight (Saturday) when a bulletin moved  shortly after 11 p.m. that actor and political activist Charlton Heston had died.

A bit of a scramble ensued. 1A designer Gabe Hartwig, who had just about reached the elevator, hustled back to consult about how we would treat it on 1A. We decided to pop a mug and refer on the page in place of the results of the NCAA Final Four games. We knocked a world wire feature out of the paper on an inside page that gave us room for a 20-inch story and a photo from one of Heston’s iconic roles as Ben-Hur.

Gabe stepped intern designer Greg Gaia through our plan, and Greg, with the late watch tonight, tended the pages from there, pulling the art for the 1A mug and inside display, and setting up the layout on the inside page.

Geof Dubson and June Heath on the copy desk pulled the material off the wires, edited and slotted the story, and wrote the headlines and captions and 1A refer in lickety-split fashion.

We cleared the pages in good shape for the 12:30 lift.”

Parker again: Nice work there. But our failure to follow through for other readers is upsetting.