Daily News says goodbye to obits ace

THE DESERTED Philadelphia Daily News newsroom has been a ghost town since its journalists merged with the

Inquirer across the hall, but a few ancient landmarks,

including 87-year-old obituary writer Jack Morrison's desk and his ancient coffee mug with the black skull and crossbones, remain amid the silence.

Thick, muddy residue coats the once-white mug's inner surface in geologic layers - 21st century, 20th century, possibly going as far back as the Jurassic Era because Morrison seemed to be a towering presence at the Daily News forever, wielding prose like a scalpel to surgically extract the heart and soul of dearly departed lives.

Morrison's recent retirement ends his decades of nurturing legions of young reporters as a mentor and honoring thousands of departed souls in his gracefully-honed obituaries.

David Gambacorta, who now writes for Philadelphia Magazine, was a cub reporter in his 20s during his formative years at the Daily News.

"On most days, Jack was more productive and energetic than staffers who were 30 and 40 years younger than him," Gambacorta said. "You could chalk some of that up to Jack really loving his job, but I also think there's a supernatural element at play. The guy literally never aged and he would regularly outrun me from the first floor newsroom to the fourth-floor cafeteria when we were at Broad and Callowhill, helpfully yelling, 'C'mon! What the hell are you waiting for?' while I huffed and puffed my way up the stairs.

"What I'm trying to say is, I think Jack might be a vampire," Gambacorta theorized. "Has anyone checked the newspapers from the Civil War era? I'm willing to bet he had a couple of bylines from the Battle of Gettysburg."

Almost, but not quite. Morrison came to the Daily News in 1982 after spending 24 years at the Philadelphia Bulletin, six years at the Main Line Times and three years in Media.

So he's retiring after 67 years as an old-school newspaperman, striding ramrod straight through the newsroom, gazing at the world through Clint Eastwood cowboy eyes, interviewing the bereaved and counseling young reporters alike in a deep, rumbling voice filled with empathic warmth.

Gambacorta said that planting reader hooks and sharpening his prose under Morrison's tough-love tutelage, "You could learn so much just from listening to his old war stories of being a rewrite man at the Bulletin in the '50s and '60s - pre-Google, pre-iPhone, pre-indoor plumbing. OK, maybe they had indoor plumbing."Both guys drank Morrison's insanely strong coffee, achieved by doubling, sometimes tripling the grinds, stimulating the brain while attacking the stomach lining.

Fellow Daily News reporter and caffeine hound Bill Bender posted a photo on Facebook and wrote, "Behold, Jack Morrison's coffee mug. He is 80-something and can kick all of our asses. Planet Earth does not produce a coffee bean strong enough to truly quench his thirst, so he just ups the intake."

Manly java fueled Morrison's manly chivalry. Barbara Laker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Daily News staffer whose shoe-leather reporting often took her down the city's meaner streets, said, "Jack was super-protective of the women in the office. I remember whenever I got threats and Jack found out about them, he'd say, 'Well, he'll have to come through me first, that son-of a ... Nobody is going to mess with Barbara.' "

Laker, a lifelong runner, admired Morrison's ageless energy. "He used to run two to three miles a day well into his 80s - in a cemetery, which I found a little odd, especially since he writes obits," she said. "But he said cemeteries were peaceful and I guess he has a point there."

Laker said Morrison always had a soft spot for children, too. "Whenever women in the office had babies or young children, he used to surround himself with photos of them in his cubicle."

Then there were the hugs. Morrison may have invented the free hug. "He loved to give women in the office hugs," Laker said. "He was just a ladies man. He seemed to have real affection and admiration for women in the office."

Upon hearing the news of Morrison's retirement, former Daily News reporter Kathy Sheehan exclaimed, "The back rubs! The back rubs! At least when we had to work nightside, there was always Jack and his back rubs! I know that won't sound too politically correct in this day and age, but Jack was always looking at ways to make our lives easier. He could just sense when you were tensing up on deadline and knew exactly how to calm you down so you could get things done."

Beneath the Gentleman Jack exterior, Morrison was, first and foremost, a newspaperman for a feisty tabloid that prized his skills at grabbing its readers. Inquirer editorial writer Cynthia Burton, who spent 12 years as a Daily News political reporter, said Morrison was a whiz at turning the humdrum into a must read.

"A few months into my time at the Daily News, I helped on a story about a minor environmental incident involving a 25-year-old fire somewhere near Fort Dix in which a nuclear missile caught fire but did not explode," Burton said. "The waste was buried but the governor wanted the site cleaned up.

"It just wasn't a big deal," she said, "but Jack needed a story so he goosed it up from a pin prick to a gushing wound. It went from an old fire to an event which 'has now cast a radioactive shadow over a large section of the state.'

"It was beautiful," Burton said. "When asked why he goosed it up so much, Jack said, 'It's our job to scare the shit out of the readers.' The headline was: JERSEY RAISES DEVIL OVER FT. DIX NUKE SITE."

Daily News Editor Michael Days said, "I don't know how many generations of journalists Jack has mentored but, let's just say that if we all gathered to give him his due, it would have to be an enormous room.

"We miss him," Days said. "The readers miss him. They call demanding to know where he is. They tell us that their loved one has passed and no one but Jack can do their loved one justice. He's a legend, and he has been one for a very long time."

Morrison said that although he wrote many obituaries about prominent people, he took special pleasure in "kind of elevating more anonymous people like the garbage man, the mail man, the ditch digger, the church woman with a community spirit - the kind of people that nobody else was writing about.

"My theory was that everybody has a story," he said. "I felt I was doing a service to the community by honoring these people. Some of their families told me that the way I wrote the story of their loved one helped them with their grief and with the mourning process. That was very satisfying. I miss that."

Frank Dougherty, a Daily News reporter from 1963 to 2001, said, "My favorite memory of Jack Morrison is when I submitted copy for Jack to edit, if he liked the story he would flash a warm smile, look directly into my eyes and say, 'This is a very good story, Frank Dougherty, one written with a quill!' "

Morrison's praise, doled out with the same economy of expression he used in his writing, was especially valued by the cub reporters he mentored.

Vinny Vella, now a Hartford Courant reporter, came to the Daily News right out of college, worked the late shift while Morrison crafted his obits, and was clearly an old-school tabloid soul in a young man's body. The kid once spent all night in a flea-bag motel famous for drug dealing and violence so he could write a first person Daily News story.

"One of my proudest moments came during Jack's run to the coffee machine," Vella said, "when he told me, 'You're doing a hell of a job here.' Just as simple as that. No lead up. No unnecessary words. He just said what he felt.

"He probably doesn't remember the exchange," Vella said. "But I do. And I probably always will: a genuine moment between the oldest and youngest reporters in the newsroom. Godspeed, Jack."

Kurt Heine, former Daily News reporter and city editor, said, "You'll hear plenty of stories about Jack's tender heart, but he's also tough."

One Sunday night in the 1990s, while Morrison was grabbing stories off a newsroom printer, its heavy, industrial-size acrylic cover slammed down on his shoulder, "immediately sending Jack into excruciating pain that later required surgery," Heine said.

He left veteran reporter Gloria Campisi in charge while he rushed Morrison to the hospital. "Jack, still in terrible pain, was admitted," Heine said. "But in spite of the pain, he was worried that Gloria might be nervous and he wanted to return to work to finish his shift. He had a lot more trouble than Gloria had jitters."

Drew McQuade, a 27-year Daily News veteran who is an assistant sports editor, said, "Once I was in the men's room and Jack had his shirt off and there was blood all over his chest. Lots of it. I said, 'You OK?' and he said, 'Ah, it's just a bee sting.' No way that was a bee sting. Don't know what it was, but he had work to do. He was a tough old bird."

A tough bird with a tender heart, McQuade added, citing the unidentified photo of a lovely young woman that has been posted in Morrison's cubicle for years.

"When I first saw the photo," McQuade said, "I asked Jack about her, thinking she was a daughter or a granddaughter. Jack said she was a young woman who died and affected him so much, he kept her photo there as a reminder. And perhaps, in case he ever got hardened about writing obits, he would remain grounded and caring if he just looked at that photo. It touched him and it was touching."

For decades, when a loved one died in Philadelphia, Morrison was the go-to guy.

Gene Castellano, former Daily News features editor, said he so admired Morrison's heartfelt obituary writing that when a friend, Father John D'Amico, a former priest and an admired Philly jazz pianist, died, "I felt that he deserved a Daily News obit."

Informed of D'Amico's passing, Morrison said, "I've got one of his CDs." To this day, Castellano remembers, "One sweet line from D'Amico's obit: 'When he died Thursday in Lankenau Hospital, doctors and nurses wept.' "

Sometimes, Morrison used his dry sense of humor to make his obits compelling. When Bridget McLoone, whose four children included Daily News managing editor Pat McLoone, died in 2014 at the age of 88, Morrison wrote, "Bridget McLoone would sit on the porch of Villa St. Martha in Downingtown, where she was living, and look toward the nearby St. Joseph Church, of which her son was pastor. A nice view, except for that darned tree! The tree blocked her clear view of her son's church and she was miffed. 'Can't you cut that tree down?' she demanded.

"Bridget Teresa McLoone was a determined Irish gal, a product of County Donegal, a woman who raised four children, helped send them all to college with faith and frugality, and saw them all become successes in their chosen professions.

"But there was nothing she could do about that tree."

Nicki Weisensee Egan, a former Daily News reporter now a senior writer at People magazine, said, "When I think of Jack, I think of this big teddy bear, always ready with a kind word and a warm smile (and a hug). He loved being a mentor to young writers, and yes, I was one of them once.

"I remember being the lone reporter for the DN out at the stakeout for John DuPont in January 1996, when he was holed up in his mansion after killing the wrestler, Dave Schultz. I called in interview after interview that Sunday (because, of course, we had no laptops we could use out there, let alone wireless access) and he calmly and quickly wrote them up, story after story. I think we had at least five stories in the paper that day, including the cover."

Former Daily News reporter Shaun Mullen said, "I was fortunate enough to come into the business in the closing years of the hot type era when the rewrite man (OK, rewrite person) was the tail who wagged the newsroom dog. We forget that until we spend even a few minutes in Jack's presence."

Those sitting close enough to Morrison's presence overheard things they still treasure.

Stephanie Farr, who faithfully kept a file of memorable newsroom quotes during her 10 years as a Daily News crime reporter, logged Morrison telling a caller, "I'm not a Catholic. I'm not a Protestant. I don't have any religion ... No, it's all a waste of time ... OK, well, then you'll get to heaven before I do."

Veteran Daily News desk editor Don Groff said, "I sat within earshot of Jack for six years and overheard his end of hundreds of phone calls, most of them interviews for obituaries. But Jack was also a counselor and confidante for many people. He offered advice with the same spare language that marked his obituary writing. One night, I overheard him tell an old, ailing friend, 'You're still alive and now you're retired. So chill out.'

"Jack muttered often to himself," Groff said, "and one muttering I heard from time to time was, 'The big sleep, the big sleep.' "

Former Daily News reporter Yvonne Latty, now a New York University journalism professor and filmmaker, said, "Jack taught me to keep it real and be unafraid in telling the truth. His support meant a lot to me at a time when I was questioning where my journalism life was heading. Scaling back, writing obits and working so closely with him rekindled my sheer joy of storytelling, and for that I will be forever grateful."

Former news editor Vince Kasper said, "When Jack was approaching his 80th birthday, he suspected that Gloria Campisi might be planning a newsroom celebration to mark the milestone. He told her that, if she had any such notion, to forget it. He didn't want the bosses to know he was that old for fear they'd try to get rid of him. Fat chance! Jack was an institution."

Gar Joseph, former Daily News city editor, said that when the Bulletin folded in 1982 and Morrison came to the Daily News, "Jack encouraged Jennifer Preston to join the DN and she was probably the best young reporter in the city. I'd known her when she was at the Bulletin, but Morrison's influence on hiring her was much more important than mine.

"Jack cared more about the people, both readers and employees, than he cared about anything else," Joseph said. "That is why reporters or editors, including me, would do anything for him. One of the most 'people persons' I've ever met."

A tribute to Jack Morrison must end, as it began, with his craving for high-test caffeine. "One Sunday night, I went into the newsroom kitchen and found coffee everywhere," fellow Daily News java-junkie Bill Bender said. "It looked like a pipe full of coffee had burst. There was a coffee lake on the floor.

"Apparently, Jack had started brewing coffee and walked back to his desk for a while," Bender said. "But something jammed and the water never shut off, so the coffee urn overflowed and flooded the floor. The coffee in the overflowing urn had been diluted. Jack does not like diluted.

"As I'm cleaning the mess up," Bender said, "Jack walks into the kitchen, completely oblivious to the coffee catastrophe, and fills his cup from the urn. He takes a sip, looks at his cup and says: 'Weak.' "

geringd@phillynews.com

610-313-8109 @DanGeringer