A newsman to the end

Al Lupo would have been the first to laugh at the irony: Newspapers are trying to survive by going all-local, all-media, and the guy who did it better than anybody in town had to go and die on us.

Nobody enjoyed walking up to total strangers and talking to them more than Alan Lupo. Even as the news about the news business was gloomy, he frequently would stop and smell the coffee.

"I've got the best job in the world," he'd say. "I get paid to shoot the breeze."

Except he didn't say breeze.

Al Lupo, who died of complications from melanoma Monday at age 70, was one of the few people who wrote for the city's broadsheet, tabloid, and alternative weekly. And he was probably the one guy who was equally comfortable at the Globe, the Herald, and the Phoenix. He was multimedia before they had a name for it. He worked on TV, in radio, for magazines. He wrote books.

He never got rich, or aspired to. He was a throwback to an era when many newspaper reporters were proudly working-class and wore their blue collars not on their necks but on their sleeves. If some journalists enjoy and seek the company of the powerful, Al Lupo felt more comfortable and needed among the powerless. He preferred sitting at a Formica table in the late, lamented Pressman's Deli in Chelsea, Massachusetts, listening to a truck driver talk about how hard it is to make a living, to sitting at a polished conference table in Davos, Switzerland, listening to some pompous windbag pontificate about the trade deficit.

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of Boston's neighborhoods and Yiddish words to describe every hero, reprobate, and phony he encountered in them. He liked cops and firefighters and teachers and knew that for every one who was lazy or corrupt there were dozens who did their jobs honorably. He believed we rarely hear about the lazy and corrupt in the private sector because people who make big money are big on hiding things.

Years ago a bunch of people were sitting in the Globe cafeteria, kvetching about everyone and everything, and somebody mentioned that the Internet was killing journalism. Everybody nodded.

Everybody except Al.

"Let me tell you," he said, sounding more like Jackie Mason than Carl Bernstein, "the telephone ain't doin' us no favors, neither."

Al Lupo knew that the best stories were found on the street. He'd been in newsrooms all his life and never saw anything remotely newsworthy happen in them.

He lamented the changing mediascape even as he believed there would always be newspapers, in whatever form they are delivered. He was many things, but above all he was a newspaperman.

"They have imperfections; all newspapers do," he wrote last year in a column in the Salem News. "But they remind me of what journalism is supposed to be about, namely, the coverage of democracy at its basic level. . . . If we cannot comprehend how our democracy works at the local level, then what hope is there for us to comprehend our national politics or the role we play on the global stage?"

Al liked newspapering because it is a team sport. He was one of those old newspapermen who got a real vicarious thrill when one of his colleagues, especially a younger one, had a good story in the paper. Tom Winship, the late Globe editor who hired Al, was famous for sending "attaboys" and "attagirls" to young reporters. Al did the same.

Caryl Rivers was talking about her husband yesterday, and she laughed more than she cried.

"You know something," she said. "Al was sending e-mails to young reporters, praising them, encouraging them, right until the end. He really cared."

Al Lupo not only managed to stay married to the same woman for a half century, he managed to stay deeply in love with her. How many guys can live 70 years and, at checkout time, say they still love their wife and their job?

You see, it really was a wonderful life.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com