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.