Obituary: Alan Lupo, streetwise Globe columnist

By Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff

To read an Alan Lupo newspaper column was to hear his voice, Boston accent saturating every syllable.

He was no stranger to the inner sanctums of City Hall, but was more at home with regular folks on Boston's stoops and sidewalks. He knew people -- and people knew him -- from the North End to Southie, from Dorchester to Doyle's pub in Jamaica Plain, where immortalized in a mural he forever soaks up stories amid the sandwiches and the elbow-benders.

"Alan Lupo brought the city streets into the newsroom," said Martin F. Nolan, former editorial page editor at the Globe. "This was a man who did it with shoe leather, the old-fashioned way. He was a street reporter's street reporter who really understood the neighborhoods."

Mr. Lupo, one of few columnists whose work appeared in the latter-day troika of Boston newsprint -- the Globe, the Herald, and the Phoenix -- died today in hospice care at Kindred Hospital in Peabody. He was 70 and had been suffering from melanoma.

"He was a good friend of the people of Boston, a good friend of the neighborhoods of Boston," said Mayor Thomas M. Menino. "He was just a very special guy."

As the Hub's Herodotus, Mr. Lupo captured the city's unfolding histories as they played out in courts, schools, and discreet handshake deals among the powerful. Reaching beyond the confines of newspaper stories, he left the Globe in the early 1970s to serve as an editor and reporter on the WGBH-TV show "The Reporters," which he helped found. Mr. Lupo also helped create WBZ-TV's I-Team and turned his typewriter to longer projects.

His 1977 book, "Liberty's Chosen Home," provided a detailed context for Boston's racial strife during the years of busing and desegregation. Written between his first and second tenures at the Globe, it became a foundation stone for better-known books that followed, such as "Common Ground" by J. Anthony Lukas, who tipped his hat to Mr. Lupo twice in his acknowledgements.

"He was the archetype of a city reporter -- in touch with all levels of the public, from the mayor to the homeless person, independent and fierce in his reporting," said Stephen Kurkjian, a former Globe reporter and editor. "We're losing an original part of our history."

Mr. Lupo also chronicled major policy decisions as one of three authors who wrote "Rites of Way: The Politics of Transportation in Boston and the US City," which was published in 1971. A decade later, he joined with his wife, Caryl Rivers, a Boston University journalism professor, to write alternating chapters of "For Better, For Worse," an amusing, book-length peek into their marriage.

But it was as a reporter from the old school that Mr. Lupo made his name when he first wrote for the Globe in the late 1960s, and again after returning in the mid-1980s to pen columns for the opinion pages, then City Weekly, then Globe North.

Mr. Lupo was born Boston and grew up in Winthrop, where he returned to raise his own family. He graduated from Winthrop High School in 1955, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1959, and from the Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in 1960.

Mr. Lupo and Rivers met when both were students at Columbia. In an interview three years ago that is posted on the Internet, they told Henry Dane that they worked together on a public television documentary on New York's health hazards.

"He would hold my hand while I was out in the alley trying to find rats," Rivers told Dane, and Mr. Lupo quipped: "Holding her hand 'cause I was scared of rats!"

Rivers today called her husband "my soulmate and my coauthor and my love for 50 years. His voice as a writer was urban and earthy and funny and warm, and that's what people cherished so much about him. He really cared about people, and people cared about him. His stories were taped to refrigerators all over Boston."

Having breathed deep the inky newsroom air as a copy boy at the Boston Sunday Advertiser, Mr. Lupo moved away to land his first reporting job at the Middletown Times Herald-Record. In 1963 he jumped to the Baltimore Evening Sun, then joined the Globe three years later.

Along with writing a book with his wife, Mr. Lupo also drew on his children for inspiration and, inevitably, column material. In 1994, he featured his son, Steve, now an FBI agent in Houston, in his column "My Son the Cop," and his actress daughter Alyssa Lupo Zulueta, of San Francisco, in "Acting to Make Parents Proud."

He also leaves two granddaughters and a grandson.

A memorial service will be held at 5 p.m. on Oct. 6 in Marsh Chapel at Boston University.

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