At first I thought it was an oversight on my part. Maybe I hadn’t read our stories closely enough: A key name seemed to be missing. So I searched the Washington Post’s archives from the date W. Mark Felt was confirmed as Deep Throat to last Wednesday’s edition. I couldn’t find the name. To be absolutely certain, I asked our crack news research department to perform the same task. This came back in an e-mail at 7:47 p.m. on June 8: “You were right, last mention of Frank Wills was in movie review of August 20, 2004.”

My goodness. How is it possible that the Post could publish reams of copy rehashing the Watergate scandal, complete with detailed timelines, personal recollections, character sketches and portraits of characters – living or dead – related to Richard Nixon’s downfall, and not once mention Frank Wills?

Without Wills’ devotion to his job, there would have been no arrest of five men inside the sixth-floor offices of the Democratic National Committee in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972. It was Wills, a 24-year-old, African American, $80-a-week security guard who spotted masking tape on a door between a stairwell and a parking garage. He thought a cleaning crew might have taped over the door latch to keep it from locking, so he removed it. When he returned to the scene and saw new tape, Wills promptly called the police.

Were it not for Wills’ suspicion of a break-in and his decisive action, the world most likely would never have heard the names E. Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy. There would have been no “Deep Throat” and no “All the President’s Men” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. There would have been no Pulitzer Prize for the Post, no image of a disgraced President Nixon waving goodbye before liftoff on Aug. 9, 1974, no President Gerald Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and probably no President Jimmy Carter to sweep into office on the heels of the 20th century’s greatest Washington political meltdown.

But in all the stories written in the Post after Felt’s admission, Wills did not get so much as an honorable mention.

It was pretty much the same way when he died of a brain tumor five years ago in an Augusta, Ga., hospital. Wills was penniless, unable to afford electricity or water and living alone in a shabby house his mother left when she died in 1993, according to an October 1, 2000, Post story. The Democratic Party had recognized him with an award. So had the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And he was given a role in the movie “All the President’s Men,” playing himself. But his fame quickly faded, even as most of the other white-collar Watergate elite – crooks and journalists alike – eventually went on to bigger and better things.

Well, for what it’s worth, there are still a few of us around who can’t think of Watergate without thinking of Frank Wills.