Francis X. Clines, a reporter, columnist and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, whose news commentary and lyrical biographies of ordinary New Yorkers are much admired as a form of literary journalism, style, died Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He is 84 years old.
His wife, Alison Mitchell, a senior editor and former assistant editorial manager at The Times, said the cause was esophageal cancer, which was diagnosed in February 2021.
For generations of Times colleagues, Mr. Clines was a near-ideal reporter: a keen observer, a steadfast fact-findinger, and a role model of integrity and fairness, who had able to write gracefully ahead of time. He counters compliments with a shrug or a little self-doubt.
He worked his entire 59-year career for The Times (1958-2017), starting out as a copy boy without a college degree or formal journalism training. After years of working as a political reporter at New York City Hall, the Statehouse in Albany and the Reagan White House, he sent letters from London, the Middle East, Northern Ireland and Moscow, where he covered the last days of the Soviet Union. .
Later, as a national correspondent, he covered political campaigns and the Washington scene, occasionally taking trips through the hills and valleys of Appalachian to write about another America that was destroyed. largely concealed. And for nearly two decades before retiring, he produced editorials and “Editorial Observer” columns praising labor and social advancements, while criticizing the gun lobby and Donald. J. Trump.
Mr. Clines built his reputation as a literary stylist with “About New York,” a feature-length column started by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Meyer (Mike) Berger, who passed Born in 1959. One of Berger’s successors, Mr. Clines wrote a column from 1976 to 1979. Although occasionally about news-related events, his column was mainly devoted to portraits. vivid representations of New Yorkers – the rich and the poor, the influential and the forgotten.
He called them sketches of the city. They are factual profiles overlaid with his literary observations and allusions, often humanistic and quite personal, like a brother’s letters home about non-human beings. usually he met.
“Tomorrow is Alice Matthew’s birthday,” Mr. Clines wrote typically on October 6, 1976,” and if you ask politely, she will tell you about her 93 years, since she saw the blinding fire horse that led to her run away from Indiana 74 years ago, until the night here in her welfare room, where she saw the spirit of Louis XIV, and he let his beautiful white horse lie on his head. on a bedridden woman’s bed to comfort her. “
“None of these stories are sad,” he continued. “Mrs. Matthews sees it. She represents a small drain on the City Personnel Administration’s budget. But she herself is a great resource of memory and a company. well, who rightfully belongs in the slick Big Apple ads to the city’s strengths as she does in the viral room she likes at the Earle Hotel off Washington Square.”
Mr. Clines wrote three 900-word “About New York” columns each week. He described a solitude Etruscan scholar pursued his work from a single room in a “frugal West Side hotel,” and a shoe salesman turned the page for concert pianists. He goes to a racetrack with a wealthy landlord, spends the night stalking prostitutes on the street, and sometimes just listen to night sound after closing time at the Bronx Zoo. Once, he attended a Chinese funeral with an Italian band playing dirge.
“Beyond the matter of life and death, the scene represents a bit of symbiosis in the neighboring cultures of Chinatown and Little Italy flourishes on Canal Street in Manhattan.” I wrote. “So there was Carmine inside Bacigalupo gathering his people in front of Mr. Yee’s open coffin and creating a disappointment for songs like ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ and a light tune light, airy from the old town, ‘Il Tuo Popolo’ (‘Your people’). Music seems to soothe the mourners.”
On a busy night during a citywide blackout in 1977, Mr. Clines caught a worse side of the city: “The looters scattered, out in numbers, in the full morning sun, then stopped brazenly to watch when the candy store owner Joe showed up and saw his shop demolished. on the sidewalks of Brownsville. It let out a fierce howl.”
Mr. Clines’ columns won Columbia University’s Mike Berger Prize in 1979, and the following year the best of them were collected in a book, “About New York.”
As a London correspondent from 1986 to 1989, he covered British politics, the arts and general news, but also covered breaking news on the Continent, Middle East and Northern Ireland, where gunfights and terrorist bombings known as “The Troubles” killed Protestants and Catholics on a regular basis.
He followed that post with a post in Moscow, from 1989 to 1992, when he helped cover the end of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s presidency and the fall of Soviet Communism .
However, no matter where he writes, he brings to his report the same observant eye and keen ear. For example, from Belfast in 1988, he wrote of a little girl surrounded by death:
“Outside the coffin, in the churchyard, red-haired Kathleen Quinn was amusing and shamelessly flirting for the past eight years of her life. “Sir, I’m going to watch TV tonight,” she said to a stranger, squinting her eyes happily and flexibly. Kathleen took her brother’s bike and skinned her knees, all while people were praying goodbye inside the church with another rebel body in another coffin.
“As it turned out, television ignored Kathleen and missed a classic Irish truth, an eye-popping sight. She climbs back on her bike and walks back in the dark, oblivious to a nearby graffiti that seems to speak of life’s dying dangers: ‘I wonder every night the monster What will animals do to me tomorrow.’ “
Francis Xavier Clines was born in Brooklyn on February 7, 1938, the youngest of three children of an accountant, Francis A. Clines and Mary Ellen (Lenihan) Clines. The boy, called Frank, and his sisters, Eileen and Peggy, grew up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn.
Frank attended St. He enrolled at Fordham University but soon dropped out before serving two years in the army.
After his discharge, he applied for a job at The Times and was hired largely on the strength of an essay he submitted detailing his hopes for a career in journalism. After a year as a clerical worker, he wrote radio newscasts for WQXR, The Times’s AM and FM stations, then covered police beatings and general duties.
His marriage to Kathleen Conniff in 1960 ended in divorce in the early 1990s. He married Mrs. Mitchell in 1995, when she was City Hall bureau chief for The Times, the two met her. when she was Moscow bureau chief for Newsday.
In addition to Mrs. Mitchell, he is survived by his first wife; four children from his first marriage, John, Kevin, Michael and Laura Clines; and a sister, Eileen Lawrence. Another sister, Peggy Meehan Simon, dead.
There are ways to reduce inflation, which is one reason Mr. Clines is interested in defending the State Legislature in Albany. Beyond the drumbeat of new laws and proposed taxes, he dissected more ill-lit legislators with a Celtic sense of absurdity: their excessive rhetoric about public service, their habits Their crude eating habits in debates, their losing battles with their mother tongue – it’s all fair game and duly reported.
“I think he is the best journalist of our time,” Charles Kaiser, a former Times reporter, said in a recent email. “His success speaks volumes about the newspaper’s commitment to beautiful handwriting more than anything else can.”
Mr. Clines once wrote a column on Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, which might be a kind of self-revelation, says: “He tries to keep things basic, to remind himself of the simple wisdom of Finn MacCool, the national hero. Ireland’s myth, that the best music in the world is the music of what happens. In ‘Elegy’, dedicated to Lowell, Heaney reminds himself:
‘The way we live,
Funny or daring,
It will be our life. ‘”
