Joe Fitzgerald pounded out his columns with such ardour you may hear him strike the keys from throughout the newsroom.
His daughter mentioned she’d go to sleep as a child to that very same rhythmic clacking coming from the handbook typewriter downstairs her dad cherished. That was Joe. Ink ran via his veins. Loyalty. Compassion. Commitment additionally flowed equally.
“He loved connecting with the people he wrote about. He never forgot a name or someone’s story and it was always so important to him to write with respect and integrity,” Kate Kelley, Joe’s daughter, informed the Herald.
She known as to interrupt the unhappy information that her dad had handed away peacefully Thursday at age 79 surrounded by his household, together with his boys Mike and Tim, after struggling a stroke.
Joe grew up in West Roxbury and raised his household in Norwood, however he belonged to Boston.
He cared deeply about everybody he met. He was passionate, OK fiery at instances, however you must be on this enterprise. No one offers up their secrets and techniques simply. Joe had the present of pulling them out.
He’d fly by the City Desk to announce his column was able to go and to inform us what different tales needed to make it into the subsequent day’s print version. He was all the time proper.
Joe understood how valuable the texture of a newspaper will be in your palms — particularly in case your byline was on one of many pages. He’d lose sleep if a typo tarnished his prose, even when we caught it.
He was additionally the grasp of the “appreciation.” If a “friend of the Herald,” as Joe would say, died we needed to write a heartfelt piece. Joe would volunteer or he’d insist we pen one.
It should even be mentioned that Joe was by no means the identical after his beloved spouse, Carol, died in October of 2012. They first met in Vermont whereas on a date squirrel searching. True story! He needed to marry her after that first outing, he’d say with fun.
Joe was additionally a deeply non secular man. His religion infused his columns. God bless him for that.
There’s an unwritten rule in journalism that you simply push apart the day by day grind to honor a fallen colleague. You put down on paper what that individual embodied.
Joe Fitz taught us that the Boston Herald can by no means die. It’s our job to pound the keys, report the reality, and honor the readers who demand our greatest daily.
A reader not too long ago wrote to level out that utilizing the time period “passed away” for somebody who died wasn’t correct Associated Press model. I’d agree, to a degree.
Joe Fitz has handed away, however what he left behind lives on in all of us.
Joe Fitz, this appreciation is for you.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”