The city of Coral Gables is the loveliest part of Miami-Dade County, Florida.

Coral Gables was founded by an extraordinary man, a racist, named George Edgar Merrick.
                                                       

                                                  

Merrick did not come from money, he was the son of a protestant minister from Pennsylvania, and had no professional training or experience in town planning, yet, inconceivably, he created Coral Gables. The land was his, left to him by his father, the City Beautiful Movement vision for the city was his, the architects were hired by him, the Spanish Mediterranean style homes were his idea, the zoning codes were his.

He hired William Jennings Bryan to pitch Coral Gables property for him.

Merrick founded the University of Miami, the Historical Association of Southern Florida, and was responsible for all of the early major road construction in the Miami area. He transformed Miami from a trading post into a major metropolis. It was all blown away by the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 and the Great Depression. Merrick ended his career as a postmaster. There are remembrances to him everywhere.

It was a remarkable life and it was cut short at age 55. What an extraordinary story! How did he die?

There is no biography of Merrick, there is a Wikipedia entry which says he died in 1942, no date, no location, no cause. There are 1,600,000 Google webpages for "George Merrick," 481,000 for "George E. Merrick died," 164,000 for "george merrick coral gables." Joining archives.com gets you a link to another site where you can purchase a death record. There is a Merrick family "expert." Yet there is no mention of how or from what George Merrick died. The most "extensive" account from Miami sites is that Merrick died "at about 2:30 am" (Miami Daily News), March 26, 1942  at Jackson Memorial Hospital, the public hospital for the Miami area (Tequesta, the journal of the Historical Association of Southern Florida.). 

It is inconceivable that there is no readily, if not instantly, available cause of death on the internet for so important a man. There is nothing from any Miami source. HOW DID THE MAN DIE! It can get a man thinking, it can. Then today, one, a newspaper account from March 27, 1942: Merrick died "after a brief illness of a heart condition," according to the Brooklyn Eagle.