Here at the Phoenix, during a six-year run that ended in 1985, Loops was the old man of a very young newsroom. A guy with a couple of kids and a mortgage, a peacetime vet with street creds. Unfailingly kind, the legendary sock full of quarters from which he dispensed coins to street folk could also, in a pinch, double as a blackjack. In a newsroom not noted for its sartorial splendor, Al, a vision in polyester, plaids, and stripes, looked as if he’d just jumped out of a hamper. In a place that could be excused for not yet having developed an institutional city memory, Loops was the archive, the Rolodex, the hard-earned and willingly shared perspective.
Lupo left the Phoenix for a stint as writer-in-residence at Clark University, and returned to the Globe in the mid 1980s, writing columns first for the op-ed pages and then, as the personal voice became increasingly devalued on Morrissey Boulevard, for the City Weekly and finally the Globe North editions. When he finally decided to show himself the door, in 2005, it was not because his ego had been bruised but because he couldn’t bear the fact that he was no longer allowed “to be a voice for those whose feelings are too rarely heard, or even expressed.”
In 1993, though, when he penned his last column for the op-ed section, Lupo still held out hope for his profession. “I am still — foolishly, perhaps — enough of an idealist to believe that the media are too often the only ones in town to help redress the grievances of those who have nobody to lobby for them in the corridors of public and private power,” he wrote. “I still believe that it is our job to raise hell responsibly and comfort the afflicted, to focus public attention on issues and events that people in power would just as soon see disappear from public discourse.”
In an affectionate remembrance the day after he died, the Globe saluted Lupo as a reporter who “brought the city streets into the newsroom.” Not surprisingly, the Globe had it backwards. Lupo’s great strength was that he regularly, and with great conviction, brought the newsroom out into the streets. And he continued to do that until just a few weeks before he died, writing columns for the Boston Herald, the Salem News, and the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune.
The greatest tribute paid to Alan during his lifetime was, according to Rivers, that “his columns were hung on refrigerators all over Boston.”
There would be no greater tribute to Alan now than to have his columns framed and hung over every desk in every newsroom in Boston. And then, if there is indeed a God who’s both fair and just, some giant seismic rumble will set them trembling until they fall off their hooks, and smash on every reporter and editor’s desk. Maybe then — under threat of splintered wood and shards of glass — those custodians of the news will find the motivation to bring the newsroom where it belongs. Out into the streets. Quickly.
Cut time, as it were.
