Last of a Dying Breed

If you’re expecting a column loaded with sage advice on accounting M&A or succession planning, stop reading immediately.

There will be none of that today.

No, this missive centers around the recent passing of a journalistic dinosaur, a rugged veteran of the Aussie/London tabloid wars who would do anything to get a story and drank enough to fill a reservoir. This week Steve Dunleavy left for that great copy room in the sky at the age of 81- a fact by itself that thumbed its nose at any accepted principles of medical science. As one veteran journalist mused “Steve never took food with his meals.”

Many remember him from his strong right of center columns for the New York Post where he staunchly supported the police and firefighters or his stint as an on-camera reporter for the nightly “A Current Affair.”

But nearly everyone who ever worked on a New York daily had their own Steve Dunleavy story, from the time he lay nearly comatose in a snowbank only to have his foot broken by a passing plow, or when he slashed the tires on his own father’s car when they both were competing for a story in their native Australia.

With an omnipresent cigarette and a pompadour that defied all known laws of gravity, he was an icon of the ink-stained wretch genre whether you loved him or hated him.

My personal vignette with him came in the summer of 1984, when, with no experience I somehow talked my way into a weekend job with the STAR magazine – one of many holdings of newspaper and magazine mogul Rupert Murdoch. One Saturday morning about 9 am I got a call from him and he immediately demanded to know with whom he was speaking with.

I introduced myself and he quickly told me to begin writing because he had a column to dictate. About halfway though he let out a loud F-bomb that rattled my ears. When I asked what was wrong, he sheepishly replied, “These damn Foster’s cans always cut your thumbs.”

Another time I ran into him outside an establishment called “Langan’s” which was the official watering hole for the New York Post. We made small talk and he vaguely recalled the Foster’s incident but not before he asked if I had a cigarette and that he was “light” and wanted suggested we go in for another round.

You can’t make this stuff up.

 If Steve Dunleavy hadn’t been born, you would have had to invent him.