Bill Gallo, the longtime cartoonist for the New York Daily News died yesterday. He was 88.
Filip Bondy has a loving tribute today in the News. And here is Lupica, delivering the goods:
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.”
…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.
Here is a gallery of Gallo’s work.
The News, and New York Sports, will not be the same without him.
I plan on raising a glass in the bleachers tonight, a true legend
That sounds ideal. I'll raise a glass from home in unison!
Growing up in Jersey, we had the Bergen Record and the NYT. So the only times we could see his cartoons were our visits to my grandparents house in Queens. Can't think of these cartoons without putting myself in that living room, the smell of my grandmother's manicotti, fried chicken, and antipasto mixing with the newsprint as my brothers and I flipped through small piles of that week's Daily News. I imagine he reached into a lot of living rooms that way.
[2] Aw shucks, if you're doing it I guess I will have to as well.
Gallo was the one who made the 1980s era Yankees bearable (well, Mattingly & Winfield too.) I really have to surpress my frustration with Steinbrenner during that decade.
I always have the feeling, and maybe this is because my generation was the last to "grow up" with newspapers, that whenever something happened with the Yankees you HAD to get the Daily News take on it the next day.
Yeah their sports page covered all the teams, but there was always a thought of "If you want to read about the Yankees, you read the Daily News." So I think as Yankee fans this one strikes a bit of a nerve even though there was no "real" connection between Gallo and the Yankees, there felt like there was.
[1] [2] [4] I will also gladly join in.
I came to Gallo's work much later than you guys - us upstate kids didn't live and die with the NYC papers - but its hard to believe he's gone.
Mine was a Times household but starting in 8th grade (1984), I read the News everyday, for Lupica and Gallo.
Met him once at a tribute for W.C. Heinz. Huge boxing fan.
I had the privilege of getting to know Gallo a bit from a book project I edited that he contributed a foreword and some artwork to. All I can say is that he was one of the kindest, most generous people I have ever run into in this business. A mensch's mensch. R.I.P.
[5],[7] Same here, except I never met him. But being a cartoonist myself, I did study him fairly often. Definitely old school, but that old school you learn something new from.
I had a strong feeling his time was coming; it seemed to me like the past year or two has been a sort of farewell tribute/tour among his peers and colleagues; nice way to go out if you have to, I say...