Francis X. Clynes, a New York Times reporter, columnist and foreign journalist, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan, where commentary on ordinary New Yorker news and lyrical profiles was widely praised as a stylish and literary journalism. I did.He was 84 years old..
His wife, Times Senior Editor and Former Deputy Editor-in-Chief Allison Mitchell, said the cause was esophageal cancer diagnosed in February 2021.
For generations of Times colleagues, Mr. Kleins was almost an ideal reporter. He is an avid observer, a tenacious fact discoverer, and a paragon of honesty and fairness that can be gracefully written in time for deadlines. He shrugged or resisted praise with a bit of self-deprecating deadpan.
He started out as a copy boy without a college degree or formal journalism training and was responsible for his entire 59-year career at the Times (1958-2017). After years of serving as a political reporter at New York City Hall, Albany State Capitol, and Reagan White House, he contacted London, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and Moscow to cover the last days of the Soviet Union.
Later, as a national correspondent, he followed political campaigns and the Washington scene, occasionally traveling through Appalachian hills and pits, writing about other Americas that were largely hidden. And for almost 20 years before his retirement, he wrote an editorial and “editing observer” column, praising labor and social progress, and blaming gun lobby and Donald J. Trump.
Klein’s established his reputation as a literary stylist in his long-standing column “About New York,” initiated by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Meyer (Mike) Burger, who died in 1959. Mr. Kleines, one of Burger’s successors. He wrote a column from 1976 to 1979. Occasionally about news-related events, his column was devoted primarily to the vibrant portraits of New Yorkers — rich and poor, influential and forgotten.
He called them sketches of the city. They are profiles of facts that combine his observations and literary hints, often in a human tone, as very personal as his brother’s letter about the extraordinary people he met. did.
“Tomorrow is Alice Matthew’s birthday,” Kleins wrote on October 6, 1976, in typical language. From her 74-year-old Indiana to the night in her welfare room where she saw the spirit of Louis XIV, he comforted her with her head lying on the counterpane of her bedridden woman. “
“None of these stories are sad,” he continued. “Mrs. Matthews sees it. She represents a small outflow of the city’s human resources management budget. But she herself is a major resource in memory and spends her time gracefully at Hotel R in Washington Square. Just like a roach-infested room, it logically belongs to a sophisticated big apple ad about the city’s strengths. “
Clynes wrote three 900-word “About New York” columns a week. He introduced a lone Etruscan scholar pursuing his work from a single room at the “Simple Westside Hotel” and a shoe salesman who turned pages for a concert pianist. He went to the racetrack with a rich landowner, spent the night watching the street prostitute, and sometimes heard the sound of the night after closing at the Bronx Zoo. Once, he attended a Chinese funeral where an Italian band was playing Dirge.
“Beyond the question of life and death, Tableau represents a bit of symbiosis in the culture of the neighborhood of Chinatown and Little Italy, which is firmly prospering about Canal Street in Manhattan,” he writes. “So there’s Carmine in Bashigarpo, gathering his men in front of Mr. Yi’s open casket, giving downbeats to songs like” Friends in Jesus, “and a calm and airy song from an old neighborhood. I sang. Popolo “(” Your people “). The music seemed to calm the mourners. “
The night he plundered the crowd during a city-wide power outage in 1977, Mr. Kleins captured the ugly side of the city. I stood up and saw his store looted on the sidewalk of Brownsville. He made a fierce howl. “
Klein’s column won the Columbia University Mike Burger Award in 1979, and the following year the best of them were collected in the book About New York.
As a London-based correspondent from 1986 to 1989, he covered British politics, art and general news, but also traveled to the latest news in the continent, the Middle East and Northern Ireland. “Trouble” killed Protestants and Catholics with numb regularity.
He followed up on a post in Moscow from 1989 to 1992 when he helped cover the end of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the collapse of Soviet communism.
But no matter where he wrote, he brought the same observing eyes and finely tuned ears to the report. For example, from Belfast in 1988, he wrote about a girl surrounded by death:
“Crossing the casket and out into the church yard, redhead Kathleen Quinn was full of shameless and fun flirting during her eight-year life.” Mr. I’m on TV tonight. “It’s supposed to be,” she said to a stranger, squinting at Prim with happiness. Kathleen took her brother’s bike and smeared her knees while people were saying goodbye to the body of another rebel in another casket in the church.
“In the end, the television ignored Kathleen and missed the classic Irish truth with pain in the eyes. She rode her bike back and left vaguely. A nearby graffiti Everything seemed about the danger of life depletion: “Every night, what will the monsters do to me tomorrow?”
Francis Xavier Klein’s was born on February 7, 1938 in Brooklyn, the youngest of three children, accountants Francis A. Klein’s and Mary Ellen (Renihan) Klein’s. A boy called Frank and his sisters Irene and Peggy grew up in the Bay Ridge district of Brooklyn.
Frank attended St. Francis Preparatory School for all boys and then graduated first in the 1956 class in the Williamsburg section. He was a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and a greedy reader of novels, biographies, history and poetry. He enrolled at Fordham University, but soon dropped out before he served in the Army for two years.
After leaving the hospital, he got a job at the Times and was mainly hired by submitting an essay detailing his hopes for a career in journalism. After a year of clerical work, he produced a breaking radio news report for WQXR, Times AM and FM stations, covering police beats and general missions.
His marriage to Kathleen Konif in the 1960s ended with a divorce in the early 1990s. He married Mitchell in 1995. She was the City Hall bureau chief of the Times. The two met her when she was the Moscow bureau chief of Newsday.
In addition to Mitchell, he has survived by his first wife. Four children from his first marriage, John, Kevin, Michael and Laura Klein’s. My sister Irene Lawrence.Another sister, Peggy Me Han Simon is dead.
There are many ways to shrink the poposity. This is one of the reasons Mr. Kleins enjoyed covering Albany’s Legislature. Beyond the new law and the beating of the proposed tax, he dissected Celtic’s ridiculous and more careless legislative practices: their exaggerated rhetoric about public services, their crude during the debate. Eating habits, their defeat in their native language-all fair games and officially reported.
“I think he was the best newspaper writer of our time,” former Times reporter Charles Kaiser said in a recent email. “His success speaks a lot about his treatise’s commitment to writing, which is more beautiful than anything else.”
Mr. Kleines once wrote a column about the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, which may have been a kind of self-revelation. Hero, the best music in the world is the music of what happens. In his “Elegy” dedicated to Lowell, Heaney reminded himself:
“Our way of life,
Timorus or bold,
It would have been our life. “
