Nearly a year ago, as the Boston Globe was in the midst of a painful downsizing ordered by its corporate owner, the New York Times Company, I put in a call to Tom Winship. At first he demurred, explaining that he didn’t want to say anything negative about his old paper. Then he paused, said he’d think about it, and call me back.

He was as good as his word. "Too many chain publications are using their newspapers as cash cows, and as such they are sapping them of their spirit and energy," he told me. "They are depersonalizing their papers. And it saddens me greatly." (See "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, June 8, 2001.)

The moment was characteristic of Winship, the long-retired but legendary Globe editor who died on March 14 at the age of 81. He was too classy to whack the paper he had done so much to build, but too passionate to remain silent. So he settled for offering a few critical remarks about the state of corporate newspapering and left it for readers to decide whether he’d intended to include the Globe.

From the moment the Taylor family sold the Globe to the Times Company, in 1993, the paper has marked a series of "end of an era" moments: the forced departure of bad-boy columnist Mike Barnicle in 1998; the replacement of publisher Ben Taylor with Times Company functionary Richard Gilman in 1999; and the retirement of editor Matt Storin, one of the few remaining alumni of Winship’s newsroom, in 2001.

None of those moments, though, could compare to the deaths of Winship and William Davis Taylor, who had died several weeks earlier at age 93. Winship was the editor from 1965 to ’84; Davis Taylor was the publisher from 1955 to ’81. Even though both got their jobs the old-fashioned way — through nepotism (Winship’s predecessor as editor was his father, Laurence) — they transformed what had been regarded as one of the country’s worst newspapers into one of its best.

A paper that had never received a Pulitzer before Winship became editor won 12 during his tenure (it has won four more since). A once-timid paper became a passionate liberal advocate of causes such as school desegregation (in J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 book on Boston’s racial crisis, Common Ground, an entire chapter is titled "The Editor") and ending the Vietnam War.

The times themselves had much to do with Winship’s rise to greatness. He thrived in what might be called the heroic era of American newspapering; his peers were Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post, and Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor of the New York Times. (An aside on titles: at the Post and the Times, "executive editor" is the top job; at the Globe, it’s the number-two post.) It was those three editors whose papers defied the Nixon administration and published the Pentagon Papers, the government’s own secret history of the Vietnam War, risking prison and winning plaudits.

By contrast, editors of big newspapers today are, above all, managers, and they lack the swashbuckling image and high public profile of their predecessors. Len Downie at the Post, Joe Lelyveld at the Times, and Matt Storin and now Marty Baron at the Globe are all rather colorless in comparison with the previous generation. Howell Raines, who succeeded Lelyveld last year, seems to aspire to larger-than-life status, but it will take some time to find out whether that’s even possible these days.

Among those who have fond memories of Winship is Boston Phoenix publisher Stephen Mindich. "In the ’70s and early ’80s, Winship was probably the only senior person at the Globe who understood the impact that the Phoenix and its writers (many of whom he tried to steal — and succeeded with some) were having on the journalistic landscape in Boston," Mindich recalls. "He would frequently call me up to ‘chat’ — i.e., pick my brain — and on many occasions he would ask me to go to lunch for the same purposes. I remember always being flattered by his attention, and at the same time always knowing he was picking my pocket. The man was a smart and wily operator, and without question did more for the Globe’s rise to prominence than anyone before or since."

Winship, of course, had his flaws. His two biggest were his failure to set up a workable order of succession and his indulgence of personality over professional standards. When Winship retired, in 1985, he was succeeded by the cerebral Michael Janeway, who left amid internal strife after barely a year. Janeway was followed by Jack Driscoll, a fine executive editor whose management-by-consensus style wasn’t up to the challenge of leading a fractious newsroom.

Driscoll was followed by Storin, who’d left the Globe in 1985 rather than let Janeway demote him, returned in 1992 from exile at the New York Daily News, and was named to the top job in 1993. Storin, a mercurial sort who provided some much-needed leadership, tamped down the excesses of Winship’s legacy: the blatantly biased, pro-liberal (and especially pro-Kennedy) political coverage and, above all, the coddling of serial plagiarist and fabricator Barnicle, a favorite of Winship and the Taylors.

But Winship’s flaws flowed from his best qualities: his curiosity, his passions, and his sense that newspapering ought to be fun.

You have to believe that, at the time of his death, Winship was more optimistic about the paper — his paper — than he’d been last spring. Under Marty Baron, the Globe has won respect for its coverage of the war against terrorism and of the pedophile-priest crisis. Moreover, the Times Company, post–September 11, has been giving the Globe the resources with which to do the job.

In Common Ground, Tony Lukas wrote of Winship that "he had never been one to sacrifice excitement for order." That was his great strength as a newsman. And it’s a quality that today’s managerial class of editors would do well to ponder.