The stories are dispatches from another world, but so is the very sound of Bill Gallo's voice. An accomplished actor might try to imitate the accent of a Queens-born, midcentury newspaperman, but few of them could ever pull it off. It is literally the sound of 10 decades in New York.
I was privileged to sit down with Gallo last month for a 90-minute interview - the last of his remarkable life. Among the many questions he answered that day in the hospital was which was his favorite of the countless interviews he had conducted during more than 70 years at the Daily News.
Gallo, our newspaper's sports cartoonist and columnist, who over the decades had been a part of many conversations with the likes of Muhammad Ali and Joe DiMaggio, was having a good day at the Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, where he was recovering from a bout of pneumonia. He was wearing a blue, freshly pressed Oxford pinpoint shirt, taking phone calls from well-wishers, and trying to work on his cartoons, which had been coming to the paper via messenger.
Right off the bat he looked me in the eye and spoke about his patriotism (his love of the notion of America as a melting pot, in particular) with the powerful directness of a man who understands his time is limited and knows his wisdom is valuable.
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