Nobody notices when you die between Christmas and New Year's.

Three years ago I posted in this space an end-of-the-year roundup of people left out of magazine end-of-the-year roundups of notable deaths. My tribute really ought to have inaugurated an annual feature, but the years 2003 and 2004 got away from me. I now resume with 2005.

The problem, as I explained earlier, is that everybody wants to take the last two weeks of December off. It shouldn't surprise us that magazines slap the croakers into the can as much as a month before New Year's Day; after all, they have long lead times. But now even wire services are jumping the gun on "year in death" features. The Associated Press published its year-end roundup on Dec. 14. This was a major disservice to the ailing eminences who had the bad judgment to die between that date and Jan. 1. (The AP only partly mitigated this offense with its kind inclusion of my wife, who died in January.)

Let us proceed, then, to our unheralded dead.

Dec. 15: Samuel Cohn. A career official in the White House budget office from 1947, when it was called the Bureau of the Budget, to 1973, after it was renamed the Office of Management and Budget. By the time he left he was more or less running the place. He called himself "the SOB of the B.O.B."

Dec. 20: William W. Howells. Grandson to William Dean Howells, a leading man of letters during the 19th century, William W. was a Harvard anthropologist who, through the examination of human skulls around the world, concluded that the genetic differences among races were vanishingly small. We really are all brothers under the skin.

Dec. 21: Albert Weimorts. Designed a big bomb built for the specific purpose of killing Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf war. It missed.

Dec. 21: Horace "Sally" Crouch. Participated in Lt. Col. James Doolittle's bombing raid over Japan on April 18, 1942. The raid was carried out to avenge Pearl Harbor. Sixteen "Doolittle Raiders" remain.

Dec. 23:  Norman Dane Vaughan. The last surviving member of Adm. Richard Byrd's expedition to the South Pole in 1928-1930. A mountain in Antarctica is named after him.

Dec. 24: Cliff Sessions. Covered the civil rights movement for United Press International. Subsequently he was a flak for the Justice department and co-founder of National Journal, a magazine about Washington minutiae.

Dec. 24: Debra Moses. See below.