Michael Hechtman, a beloved and irascible New York Submit editor who spent greater than 4 many years on the tabloid, died Friday from lymphoma. He was 82.
The veteran newsman died in his sleep at Methodist Dwelling for Nursing and Rehabilitation within the Bronx, in line with his longtime buddy, Shelagh Masline.
An evening editor with a gallows humor and penchant for belting out Sondheim tunes, Hechtman mentored generations of reporters at The Submit, giving scores of younger journalists their first break, former colleagues and proteges stated.
“I might don’t have anything with out Mike — I might not have been a reporter,” stated former Submit journo Jennifer Fermino.
Hechtman infamously would have cub reporters sit beside him at his desk, the place he would tear their tales to shreds to show them the way to write for the tabloid.
“One of many first issues he would do is create an enormous hole, six to seven areas between your byline and what was your lede, since you have been going to start out over once more,” stated former Submit reporter and Metro Editor Eric Lenkowitz.
Hechtman, he added, “gave everybody a shot” on the paper.
Michael Jay Hechtman was born in Brooklyn on April 5, 1942, to Henry Hechtman, a hat manufacturing facility proprietor within the Garment District, and Rose Sass, a homemaker. His household quickly moved to Rego Park, Queens, the place he later would stay for many years in a studio residence and not using a range.
He studied journalism at Brooklyn School, the place he labored on the varsity newspaper, and later obtained a graduate diploma from the College of Michigan, in line with Masline.
He served within the US Military Reserves, the place he dealt with writing press releases at Fort Dix in New Jersey, in line with copy editor Milton Goldstein. He was honorably discharged in 1971.
Following reporting stints on the Hartford Courant and the Related Press, Hechtman joined The Submit in 1974 as a reporter, and shortly cemented his standing as “tremendous rewrite man” — reworking avenue reporters’ harried notes into seamless prose.
“The evening that [Yankees catcher] Thurman Munson died within the airplane crash within the late 70s, [Post Publisher Rupert] Murdoch stated I would like your greatest man on this story,” former metropolis editor Dick Belsky recalled. “With out hesitation we gave it to Hechtman.”
As an evening editor, Hechtman gained notoriety for his tendency to get up reporters with zero qualms at 2 a.m. to reply questions on their tales. He additionally had an uncanny skill to trim overwritten tales to their tabloid essence.
“He may take a 20-paragraph story and switch it right into a haiku, that’s how good he was,” recalled former Submit reporter Cynthia Fagen.
His newsroom eccentricities included common rest room bulletins.
“He had this routine at evening the place he’d go to the toilet and announce to the newsroom, ‘If Madonna requires me, I’m within the center stall,’ ‘If the Pope requires me, I’m within the center stall,’” Belsky recalled.
Fermino recalled Hechtman saved of assortment of headlines that have been “too impolite” to go within the paper. And he as soon as rewrote the lyrics of “Oklahoma!” to be in regards to the Jewish new 12 months: “Rosh Hashana, the place the wind comes sweeping down the plains / and the matzoh ball stands proud and tall / we all know we belong to the shul / and the shul we belong to is cool / and once we say vey, oy vey oy vey oy vey.”
Hechtman was passionate in regards to the New York Metropolis transit system – and cats, combining his two loves by naming his many feline companions over time after the town’s varied rail methods and corporations, together with “BMT” for the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corp. and “Metro-North.”
He acquired his pilot’s license round 1979 following a visit to the South Pacific, and for a decade would fly mates and colleagues on a twin-engine Cessna for getaways to Newport and Martha’s Winery, Masline stated.
After retiring in 2014, Hechtman returned to edit part-time at The Submit, the place he wrote the column “Bizarre However True.”
“Mike was New York Metropolis,” stated former Submit scribe Linda Massarella. “The 5 boroughs have been like his personal fingerprints — he simply knew each inch of it — and as a brand new reporter, it was superior to prowl the streets realizing the perfect editor on the planet had my again.”
Hechtman, who battled dementia for the previous 5 years, had no residing relations however is survived by Masline and her daughter Cailtin in addition to her daughter’s fiancé Eddie Wood, Masline stated.
In a 2007 letter to Masline, he requested her to tell The Submit’s editors that they need to not print an obituary for him when he dies.
“In the event that they do, I’ll come again and hang-out them,” he warned.
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