Jeff McLaughlin, at 65; was longtime Globe writer, editor

JEFF MCLAUGHLIN

Much as Jeff McLaughlin loved language, writing could bring as much pain as pleasure, starting with the lead paragraph of each newspaper story he wrote for The Boston Globe.

"I know that writing was agonizing for him," said his daughter, Megan Frampton of Brooklyn, N.Y. "He'd spend as long as he could on the lead, and then go from there."

Beginning with dispatches from villages and state capitals in northern New England and ending with reports from Cape Cod, Mr. McLaughlin wrote thousands of stories for the Globe, covering everything from North Country politics to Boston's music scene. Early in his years at the newspaper, he worked month after month of 14-hour shifts as an assistant city editor during 1974, the year the Globe's coverage of desegregation in Boston's schools earned a Pulitzer Prize for public service.

Mr. McLaughlin, who also had been a city editor and arts columnist in his 29 years at the Globe, died Wednesday in his Brewster home. He was 65 and had suffered either a heart attack or stroke, doctors told his family.

Dozens of bookcases filled to overflowing lined the walls of the house he rented. Outside, Mr. McLaughlin made a point of breaking the ice in his birdfeeders to ensure winged visitors arrived year-round when he rose at dawn to greet each day.

"He had a very alternative yard," his daughter said. "He let the weeds grow, but he also tended them so they would look nice. And he had a moss garden and a rock garden."

His approach to sartorial matters was much the same. With rumpled clothes and a bearish physique, Mr. McLaughlin appeared determined not to let anyone guess he was a Harvard graduate and the best-read volunteer at a nearby dump, where he regularly staffed the swap shop. Mr. McLaughlin put in so many hours there and volunteering at a town library that during a Thanksgiving visit to Brooklyn he told his daughter he needed a vacation from retirement.

"He never had any use for money," said his friend Jeff Blanchard of Brewster. "There are givers and takers in this world, and he was a giver."

"I didn't know anyone who didn't like him because he was just so genuine," said Mr. McLaughlin's brother, Jon of Lock Haven, Pa. "He was a real human being and he cared about people. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and that's the truth. Who else would work at a dump for nothing?"

At the Globe, Mr. McLaughlin had been "a character at a time when the newsroom was full of characters," said Al Larkin, who worked side by side with Mr. McLaughlin on the city desk in the early 1970s and is now executive vice president at the newspaper.

"Once when I asked him what he really wanted to do in life, he said he wanted to be a philosopher king," Larkin said. "That would have been a pretty good job for him, and journalism was a pretty good fallback. The guy did love newspapers. He was a true newspaper man."

Jeffrey Francis McLaughlin was born in Fall River, went to high school in Providence, and entered Harvard a couple of months before turning 16. After graduating, he spent a few years working at an insurance company, a car dealership, and attending law school before moving north to work as a reporter and then as an editor at the Valley News in West Lebanon, N.H.

When he began covering northern New England for the Globe in 1970, he was living with his family in a small New Hampshire village along the Connecticut River, inhabiting an 80-year-old former parsonage. He had married Abigail Crear and they had a daughter.

"I'm happy, the Globe seems happy, and the association is likely to be long-lived," he wrote two years later for his 10th anniversary class report.

In 2004, a few years after retiring, he freelanced a final story to Globe Sunday Magazine, extolling the virtues of Cape Cod. "Attitude adjustment is open to one and all. It's free," he wrote, "The Big Idea is to slow down, let go, and live by the natural rhythms of sun, moon, tides, and weather."

In the intervening 33 years, the rhythm of his life usually pulsed to the pace of journalism's daily grind. Exhausted by editing on the city desk, "I told the Globe I wanted to go back to writing as soon as they could find another fourteen-hour-a-day idealist," he wrote for the 20th anniversary report of his Harvard class.

For a time, Mr. McLaughlin penned a weekly column for the Globe on Boston's arts scene. His marriage ended in divorce and his home - always a crash pad for colleagues and his daughter's friends - became a temporary residence for some musicians passing through the city.

"When my parents split up, I stayed with him," his daughter said. "And even though he was a hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-smoking journalist, he made sure he was there at home at night for me."

He later was a reporter based on Cape Cod, then was assigned to write for the Globe's South Weekly section. Tiring of the commute north, he retired in 1999.

At one point he winnowed his books to 1,000 and his albums to 3,000, but they multiplied in recent years. He called himself "a spendthrift record collector" and "a philosophical anarchist." In 1987, he wrote that he had added another label: "teetotaler."

"I've tried these twenty-five years, with varying degrees of success, not to live life meanly," he wrote for his 25th anniversary class report. Of journalism, he wrote that "the most rewarding aspect of this career is its nurturing the belief that life is an endless adventure, to be shared with every single traveler you meet along the way."

In addition to his daughter and brother, Mr. McLaughlin leaves a sister, Donnell Campbell of Oakland; and a grandson.

A service will be announced.