Near the end, when he was in the hospital in White Plains and it seemed the only thing that kept him going was his love of this newspaper and the love of his family, Bill Gallo was still a newspaperman, and an artist. And the old Marine would not quit.
This newspaper, the Daily News newspaper, was born in 1919, and Gallo was born in 1922 and first walked through the doors as a copy boy and into the rest of his life in 1941. He was more the Daily News than anybody who ever lived. He would keep drawing his pictures. He would keep telling his stories through those pictures to the end. We hear all the time about how the newspaper business is supposed to be dying. Nobody ever told Bill Gallo, even as he was.
"The News is the only life I ever really knew once I got back from the war," he told me one time, not so long after I first walked through the doors of the old offices on 42nd St., between 2nd and 3rd, that famous globe in the lobby. "And it's the only life I ever wanted."
So even as the end came up on him, he stayed at it. Even at the end, he could not bear the idea of the newspaper coming out without him in it. So a Daily News photographer, Sam Costanza, would go by the hospital or to Bill's house and pick up his cartoon. Or he would send them sometimes by FedEx. Or if somebody came by to visit him in the hospital and said they would be going into the city, he would send the cartoons with them.
From his gifted right hand to the paper to the reader. Like always. There was no miracle of technology behind this, no button that he could press on a laptop that sent his work from here to there. There was just Bill Gallo's talent keeping him alive at the end. There was just the work. He was not so far away from 90 years of age. Just a few years younger than the newspaper.
And the work kept coming to the sports department of the New York Daily News. There will never be another career like this.
His last office, really, was that hospital room, Bill surrounded by Dixie cups filled with his colored pens and his pencils. His tools at hand. Continuing the kind of relationship with his readers that the rest of us can only dream about. His last cartoon was published a few weeks ago. It was about the Royal Wedding.
This was the last of about 15,000 of them in his career, 15,000 drawings to go with all the words he wrote, about everything, about the war and Gallo’s Geezers and old boxers and his friend Joe DiMaggio. This was the last of them after all the ones about Yuchie and Gen. Von Steingrabber and Basement Bertha. He had a run of 50 years as the sports cartoonist at the News. Fifty. The life he wanted, in the world he wanted. Sitting in his office on 42nd Street and then later over on W. 33rd. Making his own kind of magic in the newspaper business.
He seemed to know everybody, the way everybody in town knew him. I was just a kid at The News when I met him, and it was a few months after that when I came up to the office one day and came around the corner and there sitting in Gallo's office was DiMaggio.
"I'd like you to meet a friend of mine," Gallo said.
Later, when DiMaggio was gone, I told Bill that he was nothing like what I heard, that he couldn't have been nicer and more gracious.
"Now that he knows you, he'll always be like that," Gallo said. "Just as long as you don't ever do one thing."
I asked him what that was and he said, "Mention Marilyn Monroe. You do that, he'll just get up and leave."
That was more than 30 years ago. DiMaggio left us for good nearly 13 years now. Bill Gallo kept going, kept writing and drawing until he was finally too weak to do either. Maybe he would have been gone months ago without the pens and pencils and drawing pads, without the work. He fought in Saipan and Tinian and Iwo Jima during the war, but was never tougher in those places than he was in those last weeks in the hospital, out of which Bill Gallo's work kept coming.
Greg Gallo, Bill's son, who had such a good, long run as the sports editor of the New York Post, said this of his father Tuesday night:
"My father is a lasting legend to New York, and to New York sports. He will forever be thought of as a great cartoonist, a sports cartoonist for the Daily News, but he will also be remembered as the gentleman he was to all the people he came across, everybody in the streets of the city."
Then Bill Gallo's son said this:
"What it took for him to want to work in the last months of his life defined him. He loved his work. In the hospital he would say, 'You're my editor. What do I need to make the lines straight and the words right? Just make sure it's right.'"
And of course it was. How could it not be? There he was, where he had always been, in the pages of the Daily News, living out the dreams he brought through the doors with him 70 years ago.
"He was a gift to the city and to his newspaper, the Daily News," Greg Gallo said Tuesday night.
He was a friend to anybody who ever opened this newspaper and cared about it. And so today, one last time, you open the paper and there is Bill Gallo. There is Bertha and old Steingrabber, and Yuchie and Thurman Munson the day after he died. There is the work of those pens and pencils and brushes. The right hand reaches out one last time, across all the years, and the business is alive and so is he.
This newspaper, the Daily News newspaper, was born in 1919, and Gallo was born in 1922 and first walked through the doors as a copy boy and into the rest of his life in 1941. He was more the Daily News than anybody who ever lived. He would keep drawing his pictures. He would keep telling his stories through those pictures to the end. We hear all the time about how the newspaper business is supposed to be dying. Nobody ever told Bill Gallo, even as he was.
"The News is the only life I ever really knew once I got back from the war," he told me one time, not so long after I first walked through the doors of the old offices on 42nd St., between 2nd and 3rd, that famous globe in the lobby. "And it's the only life I ever wanted."
So even as the end came up on him, he stayed at it. Even at the end, he could not bear the idea of the newspaper coming out without him in it. So a Daily News photographer, Sam Costanza, would go by the hospital or to Bill's house and pick up his cartoon. Or he would send them sometimes by FedEx. Or if somebody came by to visit him in the hospital and said they would be going into the city, he would send the cartoons with them.
From his gifted right hand to the paper to the reader. Like always. There was no miracle of technology behind this, no button that he could press on a laptop that sent his work from here to there. There was just Bill Gallo's talent keeping him alive at the end. There was just the work. He was not so far away from 90 years of age. Just a few years younger than the newspaper.
And the work kept coming to the sports department of the New York Daily News. There will never be another career like this.
His last office, really, was that hospital room, Bill surrounded by Dixie cups filled with his colored pens and his pencils. His tools at hand. Continuing the kind of relationship with his readers that the rest of us can only dream about. His last cartoon was published a few weeks ago. It was about the Royal Wedding.
This was the last of about 15,000 of them in his career, 15,000 drawings to go with all the words he wrote, about everything, about the war and Gallo’s Geezers and old boxers and his friend Joe DiMaggio. This was the last of them after all the ones about Yuchie and Gen. Von Steingrabber and Basement Bertha. He had a run of 50 years as the sports cartoonist at the News. Fifty. The life he wanted, in the world he wanted. Sitting in his office on 42nd Street and then later over on W. 33rd. Making his own kind of magic in the newspaper business.
He seemed to know everybody, the way everybody in town knew him. I was just a kid at The News when I met him, and it was a few months after that when I came up to the office one day and came around the corner and there sitting in Gallo's office was DiMaggio.
"I'd like you to meet a friend of mine," Gallo said.
Later, when DiMaggio was gone, I told Bill that he was nothing like what I heard, that he couldn't have been nicer and more gracious.
"Now that he knows you, he'll always be like that," Gallo said. "Just as long as you don't ever do one thing."
I asked him what that was and he said, "Mention Marilyn Monroe. You do that, he'll just get up and leave."
That was more than 30 years ago. DiMaggio left us for good nearly 13 years now. Bill Gallo kept going, kept writing and drawing until he was finally too weak to do either. Maybe he would have been gone months ago without the pens and pencils and drawing pads, without the work. He fought in Saipan and Tinian and Iwo Jima during the war, but was never tougher in those places than he was in those last weeks in the hospital, out of which Bill Gallo's work kept coming.
Greg Gallo, Bill's son, who had such a good, long run as the sports editor of the New York Post, said this of his father Tuesday night:
"My father is a lasting legend to New York, and to New York sports. He will forever be thought of as a great cartoonist, a sports cartoonist for the Daily News, but he will also be remembered as the gentleman he was to all the people he came across, everybody in the streets of the city."
Then Bill Gallo's son said this:
"What it took for him to want to work in the last months of his life defined him. He loved his work. In the hospital he would say, 'You're my editor. What do I need to make the lines straight and the words right? Just make sure it's right.'"
And of course it was. How could it not be? There he was, where he had always been, in the pages of the Daily News, living out the dreams he brought through the doors with him 70 years ago.
"He was a gift to the city and to his newspaper, the Daily News," Greg Gallo said Tuesday night.
He was a friend to anybody who ever opened this newspaper and cared about it. And so today, one last time, you open the paper and there is Bill Gallo. There is Bertha and old Steingrabber, and Yuchie and Thurman Munson the day after he died. There is the work of those pens and pencils and brushes. The right hand reaches out one last time, across all the years, and the business is alive and so is he.
