Robert McG. Thomas Jr.

Take, for instance, Anton Rosenberg of Greenwich Village, a pal of Jack Kerouac’s and a painter of acknowledged talent who embodied the hipster ideal of cool "to such a laid-back degree and with such determined detachment that he never amounted to much of anything."

Or Frederic A.C. Wardenburg 3d, who briefly during World War II vacated his gray and staid life as a DuPont executive to penetrate German lines as a spy for the Manhattan Project and along the way enjoyed "liberating wine cellars and having drinks with Marlene Dietrich in the Ritz bar."

Or Helen Bunce, a.k.a. "the Mitten Lady," a religious woman from up near Lake Ontario who spent her days knitting mittens and hats and scarves for poor children all over the world, "who knitted so many mittens she didn’t know what to do unless she was knitting more mittens."

Anyone who’s given more than a casual glance at the obit page of The New York Times could tell instantly that the writer who provided these characters with their ultimate send-off had to have been none other than Robert McG. (for McGill) Thomas Jr., 60. A long-time rewrite man and sportswriter, Thomas, lately on sick leave but eager to get back, has in the autumn days of his career set the mordant craft of obituary writing on the road to becoming high newspaper art.

Whether it’s the luncheonette cook who emerged as the chopped liver queen of the Bronx, or the Chicago tailor who came up with the design for the Zoot Suit, or the Hopi mystic who sprinkled cornmeal on the podium before addressing the United Nations in his quest for World Peace, Thomas has a genius for illuminating that sometimes ephemeral apogee in people’s lives when they prove capable of generating a brightly burning spark.

"With a few phone calls Bob can take these stories and give them such a sense of humanity and personality that they become a celebration of life rather than a funeral," says Norma Sosa, the Times editor who in 1994 plucked Thomas away from the sports side after admiring, among other things, the manner in which he memorialized the life of boxer Jack Sharkey. Thomas wrote that in Sharkey’s 1927 loss to Jack Dempsey he had turned to the referee to complain about a low blow, creating a window of inattention Dempsey used for landing a tremendous haymaker "that knocked Sharkey into the middle of the previous morning." The "previous morning" came from the fact that when Sharkey finally regained consciousness he groggily reminded his manager that he had to fight Dempsey that night.

Aside from his byline, there are several clues to recognizing a Thomas opus, one of which is a magnified attention to the salient detail. He felt, for instance, that a profile of the inventor of kitty litter would have been incomplete had he not also informed readers that cats were bred originally to the desert climes of Egypt, and thus "make such an efficient use of water that they produce a highly concentrated urine that is one of the most noxious effluences of the animal kingdom."

In his leads, Thomas strives to work free of the inevitable "who" clause that bedevils all obit writers and find a more graceful way into the piece. Witness the opening to his obit about a 1930s nightclub belle from Georgia, who sat at the piano with George Gershwin while he composed Porgy and Bess and was limoed around by Condé Nast: "Honeychile Wilder is dead, and if the ‘21’ Club is not in actual mourning, it’s because the venerable former speakeasy on West Fifty-second Street was closed for vacation when word got around that one of its most memorable former patrons had died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center."

He also harbors a deep distaste for the traditionally short, declarative newspaper sentence in favor of a rat’s nest of dependent clauses whereby the thing seems to die and then comes back to life several times over until the reader despairs of ever arriving at a period, the champion in this regard being a eighty-eight-word wonder that led off an obit for Anne Hummert, creator of the classic radio serial "Ma Perkins." And Thomas tends to talk the way he writes. "Now, while I will concede to you that I might write a sentence that may be too long," he says, settling into his chair, "I am totally convinced from experience and when all is said and done that, whatever you can say is deficient in a sentence for being overly long, it is decidedly better than the two or three or four sentences, which is what happens to it when it’s broken up by . . ." and here a rare note of venom . . . "the desk."

Lanky and white-haired, with a slightly faded accent from Shelbyville, Tennessee, Thomas matriculated for a while at Yale but flunked out in 1959 for having "majored in New York." Because of his fond experience on the Yale Daily News, he saw his future in the newspaper business. "It dawned on me that what I was doing at the Daily News was exactly what The New York Times was doing, and most of the time I was doing it better."

That year he started on the Times as a copy boy, labored up the coursus honorem, eventually to cover everything from police and city hall to society and financial news. Before settling down in sports, he spent seven years on rewrite in the 1970s, an experience that provides him his fondest memories. "To me, rewrite is the ultimate of being a journalist," he says. "Whether you’re covering the pope’s tour of Poland or some airplane crash in Ceylon, you’re doing it all by phone and you’re the last line of the paper’s defense. When I get sent out on a story I just get overloaded. You get so much stuff you can’t possibly use – I mean I could write a novel."

Thomas gets assigned his obits by the desk and, because of his reputation, lands the colorful characters rather than pillars of the community. For this reason he has little chance to follow the practice of the famous Times obit man Alden Whitman, who liked to interview subjects in advance, and so deploys his phone work these days looking for facts that don’t usually make it into the clips. This was how he found out about Fred Rosenstiel, a wealthy son of a Dutch businessman who devoted his life to planting gardens in parks and housing projects around New York City. As the only one in his family to escape from the Nazis, friends said, Rosenstiel "seemed to find it hard to forgive himself for surviving the Holocaust." He did his planting, Thomas’s obit said, "to alleviate an abiding sadness in his heart."

More often, though, Thomas finds himself patched into the home of the deceased where relatives and friends are dwelling on lighter memories. "What do you do at a wake? – you tell what the guy was like, you remember the great times, the stories. And so what I look for is where there might have been a twinkle in the guy’s eye. If I have any skill, I think that’s where it comes in."

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