I never heard anybody work the phones better than Joe, even when the glory had faded and he was a tad burnt out. He was a curmudgeon who grew up in a tough area of the city that was later cleared for the United Nations complex. He was a kind, even courtly, man, at least to me, but definitely had a chip on his shoulder. Once, he told me, he was aloft in one of the Daily News airplanes, and made a point of peeing on the city. A chronic smoker himself, Joe would make a grand show of emptying my overflowing ashtray when I was Head of Copyboys at the Daily News. He wrote a very gripping story the day he finally quit cigarettes, but he died much too young not long after. He had grace with grit.
