Jim Calogero, 90, reporter for Globe

JIM CALOGERO

Colleagues who saw Jim Calogero arrive at work clad in a suit and tie in the years when sartorial elegance in newsrooms was as rare as typewriters would not be surprised to hear he was first drawn to his profession because journalists looked sharp.

"He was witness to a North End crime of some sort," Joyce Calogero of Lynnfield said of her father's childhood, "and he noticed that the first people on the scene were the reporters. And they were all so nattily dressed that he said, 'I want to be one of those.' "

Even in the 1980s, "when the kids were coming in with short-sleeve shirts, he'd always wear the seersucker suit in the summertime," said Edward J. Doherty, a former managing editor at the Boston Globe. "He was a stickler for tradition."

A writer who could evoke Boston's seedy past in one story and its courtliness in the next, Mr. Calogero chronicled much of the city's 20th-century history in a career as a reporter, editor, and freelancer that spanned more than 70 years, much of that time with the Associated Press and the Globe. He died in Kaplan Family Hospice House in Danvers on Aug. 8 of complications of surgery to repair a broken hip. Mr. Calogero was 90 and had lived in Peabody.

Crime and criminals were among his favorite subjects. He honed his knowledge growing up in the North End, refined his expertise through reporting, and gracefully captured the sometimes comical juxtaposition of the honest and the dishonest.

"Joe and Nemo's was on Cambridge Street at the very edge of gaudy and often-sleazy Scollay Square, a most unlikely place for a restaurant to flourish," Mr. Calogero wrote in the Globe seven years ago about a famous hot dog stand. "Its neighbors in the same block of aging, sign-plastered businesses were such inelegant enterprises as a shooting gallery and a tattoo parlor. Upstairs, on the second floor, according to police records, a dentist was busy, not with teeth, but as a very active bookie."

Because of his institutional memory about organized crime, Mr. Calogero was a go-to guy for those with questions, and "he could name names, too," Doherty said. "With the underworld, it wasn't like he was reading about them. He knew these guys."

Mr. Calogero also knew music, particularly Dixieland and big band. With his love of detail, he memorized ensemble lineups, from the headliners to side players.

"For most old-timers, today's musical groups are considered unworthy replacements for the big bands and the disciplined and immaculately groomed musicians who played that thing called swing," he wrote for the Globe in 2005 about the ballrooms that once flourished in Greater Boston.

He set aside any suggestion that music from decades past was chaste: "Innocence? When's the last time anyone's heard such sentiment in song lyrics as 'a trip to the moon on gossamer wings ?' Or 'I never saw rainbows in my wine, but now that your lips are burning mine.' . . . Those were the days."

Mr. Calogero started writing for a weekly newspaper in the city when he was 16 and a student at Boston English High School. Three years later, he began his first stint at the Associated Press in a junior reporting position and left to work at newspapers in Keene, N.H.; Lynn; and Southbridge.

For four years during World War II, he served in the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps and was stationed in Europe. He returned to the AP in 1946 and stayed for 20 years, holding a variety of jobs and covering events including the Brinks robbery in 1950 and the sinking of the Andrea Doria, which collided with another ocean liner off Nantucket in 1956.

Beginning in 1966, he directed public relations at Brown University and several years later did a stint editing Air Travel Journal and another publication at Logan International Airport.

Mr. Calogero spent a decade at the Globe on the copy desk and as a reporter and was heading out on assignments at 67, more than half a century after he first began filing newspaper stories. Among the events he covered were the 1984 wake and funeral of New England Mafia boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca.

"He brought with him that crisp AP writing style and carried that through at the Globe," said Jerry D'Alfonso, former Living/Arts editor at the Globe. "He worked fast, and he was very accurate. He knew what a deadline was and absolutely was right on. In addition, he was a terrific luncheon partner. Jimmy was a great storyteller."

He kept telling stories even after retiring at the end of 1984, writing the Globe Santa coverage for many years and freelancing for the paper until he was 87. Two years ago, Mr. Calogero wrote about his World War II service with the Counter Intelligence Corps and published it in The Brooksby Villager, a quarterly at the Brooksby Village retirement community in Peabody.

"Our training included how to pick a lock, tap a telephone, use electronic listening devices, jump-start a car, how to blow open a safe, learn a foreign language, and even how to pick a pocket," he wrote. "I could have become a helluva crook."

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Calogero leaves his wife of 60 years, Adele (Akule); another daughter, Judith Rosemary Perkins of Nantucket; a sister, Josephine Sano of Burlington; and four grandsons.

A funeral Mass will be said at 11 a.m. Saturday in the chapel at Brooksby Village in Peabody. Burial will be private.