A Good Man Gone

The lights burned a bit dimmer last week when former Boston Globe editor Thomas Winship died at the age of 81. He was a good friend to both my mother and father and was helpful to me throughout my time as a contributor to the newspaper he loved.

I liked him a lot. He was smart and funny and suffered attention deficit disorder long before it became a disease. The last time I saw him was for lunch at one of his clubs in Boston and he had all the latest gossip and plenty of advice. Our politics were almost diametrically opposed, but that hardly mattered. If the measure of a man is his capacity for friendship, then Tom Winship was seven feet tall.