Jerry Hickey, 85; editor gave magazines a literary touch

With his ready wit, Jerry Hickey delivered bon mots in writing and in person with impeccable timing, whether the quip was spontaneous or meticulously revised.

"Your article, 'One season, two faiths,' struck a sensitive note, but one wonders whether the kiss is bestowed under the mistletove or the mazeltoe," he wrote in a one-sentence letter to the editor in 1993 about a Globe article on couples who face the December dilemma of reconciling Jewish and Christian backgrounds.

Just as puckish in a social setting, Mr. Hickey set the tone for his marriage when he took his future wife to a jazz club in New York City on their first date.

"They weren't going to let him in because he didn't have a tie," said his wife, Sue, laughing at the memory, "so he took off his belt and put it around his neck as a tie, and they let us in. I think he kind of raised eyebrows."

Long a guiding light in Boston's writing circles, Mr. Hickey had served as editor of Boston magazine and of Bostonia, the alumni magazine at Boston University, where he taught for many years. He died of heart failure June 23 in Brighton House rehabilitation center in Brighton after years of keeping an array of maladies at bay. Mr. Hickey was 85 and had lived in Newton.

At Bostonia, he was editor in chief until 2000, then editor at large until he turned 82.

"Still editor at Bostonia," he wrote in 2003 for the Bowdoin College alumni notes. "Is it masochism or inertia?"

Few would have considered his life inert.

Born in Newton, Jerrold Rock Hickey grew up with "many, many friends -- he was the kind of person people gravitated to," said his sister, Jinny Eshoo of Portsmouth, N.H. "Mother used to say, 'Oh, he must be coming back from college' because of the number of phone calls we'd get before he arrived."

During World War II he served in the Navy on a submarine chaser, rising to the rank of lieutenant. He also indulged his expansive appetite for books. With perhaps a touch of exaggeration, Mr. Hickey estimated that he read up to 100 books a month while at sea. That habit continued his entire life.

"Whenever you saw Jerry, he was reading something," his wife said. "Even when you were talking with Jerry, sometimes he was reading."

He graduated from Bowdoin in 1947, received a master's in business administration from Harvard Business School in 1949, and headed to New York City's publishing industry. He honed his skills at publishing houses and as features editor at Harper's Bazaar, then became editor of Boston magazine in 1964.

That same year he married Sue Livingston on Nov. 14, five years to the day after their first date at the jazz club, and adopted her two children from a previous marriage.

Beginning in the early 1970s, Mr. Hickey was the Boston Housing Authority's director of communications, the agency's public voice during the years of desegregation. Always a writer even when he was a spokesman, Mr. Hickey freelanced reviews and poems and helped found New Boston Review, a journal that became the Boston Review.

Stepping away from the public arena, he began teaching at Boston University in the early 1980s. He retired in 1994 and was soon summoned to edit Bostonia.

"When Jerry took over, it suddenly became a magazine about Boston, about Boston University," said Michael B. Shavelson, a former colleague at Bostonia who now is editor at Columbia Magazine at Columbia University. "It was a magazine that became aware of its roots. Jerry really leaned on the rudder and brought the magazine home."

With Boston magazine, and later with Bostonia, he was receptive to what readers wanted to see, while still offering a taste of the far-flung subjects where his intellectual curiosity roamed.

"Jerry had a great love for literature, for poetry, for James Joyce, but he also knew he wasn't editing the James Joyce quarterly," said Shavelson. "He knew he was editing a general-interest magazine. He was sensitive to that, but knew the audience occasionally needed to be challenged."

For Mr. Hickey, a magazine article often began gestating when he ran across something that caught his eye. Clipping the article, he would slip it into a desk drawer.

"It would emerge months or a year later as an idea," Shavelson said. "He really took a long view of things, that a good magazine article takes time to develop."

Sometimes he circulated a clipping among friends and relatives, jotting a list of names on a note taped to the first page to keep track of who he thought should read the article. His mind was its own file of arcane erudition.

"He had a wonderfully broad knowledge of the literary scene and literary things," said Harry Lodge of Beverly, a friend who participated in a monthly reading group with Mr. Hickey.

Formed initially to read Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," the group moved on to "Proust and then Browning, then restoration comedy, and then we went back to read Joyce again, just to make sure he was just as unintelligible as the first time," Lodge said.

Meeting at the homes of members, the group could begin with something as simple as "bad screw-top wine and even worse macaroni and cheese" before everyone settled down to read, Lodge said. "Jerry was a man of enormous enthusiasm, and so when he was reading you just felt he was trying to be everything Joyce wanted in this particular passage. No matter how whimsical or outrageous the passage was, Jerry gave it his all."

He was just as enthusiastic on the squash courts at the Harvard Club, where his partner often was Martin Slobodkin, the Boston socialite who died in October. When Mr. Hickey was 80, he and Slobodkin were featured in a Boston magazine feature called "The Old and the Restless."

"I've probably psyched myself into believing I never had it so good," Mr. Hickey said. "We're all moving on, and I hope we all die at the same time. You get the feeling that closure is coming, but it just seems like a natural thing. This is the way the chapter ends."

Behind his house was a dock that jutted into the Charles River. After work, Mr. Hickey would climb into a canoe and paddle through the early evening, sometimes with his wife, sometimes alone.

"He would canoe upriver with a Mason jar filled with some sort of cocktail," Shavelson said," and then he would let the current bring him back while he read, one oar in hand acting as a rudder."

In addition to his wife and sister, Mr. Hickey leaves his daughter, Victoria of Cambridge; his son, Tristan of London; and two granddaughters.

A private service will be held.