A fitting tribute
A memorial service for Alan Lupo was held, in BU’s Marsh Chapel, on October 6. It was attended by a capacity crowd of roughly 500 — a who’s who of Boston journalists; politicians past and present, including Mayor Tom Menino; and a predictably diverse selection of the fabled columnist’s academic and non-professional friends. The congregation succeeded in emotionally integrating a service comprising readings from Lupo’s columns, the Kaddish, and a “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” sing-along. It was a fitting and, you might say, well-rounded celebration of a life well lived.
BU has established a scholarship in Alan Lupo’s name. Direct queries and donations to Alan Lupo Journalism Scholarship, c/o Department of Journalism, Boston University, 640 Comm Ave, Boston, MA 02215. — Ed. |
Appropriate enough for a guy who sounded like a (much) funnier second cousin to Jackie Mason, Lupo began his full-time reporting career in the Catskills. In 1963, he moved to the Baltimore Evening Sun to cover city hall. But by 1967, he was lured back home with the promise of a chance to become part of editor Tom Winship’s expansive newspaper experiment at the Boston Globe.Winship became a big Lupo booster after the reporter took an in-depth look at Boston’s Puerto Rican community. That story, Rivers says, made Winship realize that Lupo “had a real talent, had a real interesting voice.” As part of the paper’s first urban reporting team, Lupo went on to develop major stories, such as Massport’s threatened airport-expansion encroachment into East Boston and the Inner Belt, a six lane, limited-access highway that would have gutted large parts of Cambridge and Roxbury. His stories actually held off the expansion and helped deep-six the roadway.
Street wisdom
One of the great destructive myths around today is the notion of journalistic objectivity, the celebrated detachment that perpetuates a dishonest truth. In reality, everything about journalism is subjective, starting with the daily decisions editors make to determine what stories will get space in the next issue. To pretend otherwise is, well . . . to pretend.
What shouldn’t be a myth is fairness. Alan Lupo was sure as hell not objective. But he was, above all, fair. And fairness is the handmaiden to justice.
“Coming from working-class Winthrop, he had a feel for people who didn’t have power, didn’t have money, couldn’t go up to City Hall and get a favor,” Rivers remembers. Lupo had “a real strong sense that being a reporter was about making stuff right.”
He left the Globe in the early 1970s to serve as an editor and reporter on the WGBH-TV show he help found, The Reporters. Lupo also helped create WBZ-TV’s I-Team of investigative reporters. He undertook book projects, most notably 1977’s Liberty’s Chosen Home, the critically acclaimed account of the Boston school-busing crisis. He made a brief stop at Boston magazine, where he was quickly disillusioned by how little our city magazine cared about the city.
