CELEBRATING THE CAREER OF A COLUMNIST AND A GENTLEMAN

I was the young critic. Bob Curran was the veteran columnist. I had gone down to the smoke-filled mezzanine of the old News building at Main and Seneca streets to talk to its arts and features denizens. Bob was the resident columnist in that cubbyhole where eccentricity was allowed to roam brave and free. He proudly kept a bulletin board over his desk with only one piece of reader mail on it -- an unsigned postcard whose single, heartfelt sentence told Bob, "You're so stupid, you don't even make idiot."

I'm writing this story -- in truth -- partly because it was one of the four mildly witty things I've said off the cuff in 30 years here. Mostly I'm writing it because it's about a side of Bob Curran that no one knows except those of us lucky enough to work with him.

Bob Curran liked and respected other writers, especially young ones. He paid attention to new bylines. And when they belonged to those under 30, he went out of his way to seek them out, chat them up through chronically clenched teeth, tell them what of theirs he liked, drop a few famous names and then wander off with a concluding "H.T." (an abbreviation of "hang tough," that all-purpose phrase which functions in Curranese as the equivalent of "aloha" in Hawaiian or "shalom" in Hebrew).

Such wonderful cross-generational nurturing is a great and sadly waning newspaper tradition. I was lucky enough to start writing here when all sorts of older talents considered it their duty to take everybody under their wing who might fit and pass on what they knew of life.

Which was a lot.

The scandalous, seldom-revealed fact about Bob Curran -- war hero, arch-conservative (one-time idolater of Spiro Agnew, all-time Jane Fonda basher) and public raconteur -- is that he was, for 32 years, one of the nicest and most generous guys in the place.

At some point, after winning a couple of Bronze and Silver Stars (each), having three sons and editing Cavalier magazine, he apparently came to the conclusion that there was no point in not being as affable and generous as possible to everyone he met. It made him a prince among us.

I've spent 30 years telling people this. I'd say: "Forget the politics for a second. If you knew the guy, you'd love him. He'd give you the shirt off his back and probably pay for the cleaning, too."

It has been tough to convince people. My wife of 15 years was a dedicated Curran reader. She loathed almost every word he wrote (and most of his punctuation, too), but -- significantly -- read him almost religiously in the '70s, when Bob could always be counted on to be the cheerful public scourge of everything that fell even slightly to the left of Calvin Coolidge. Some days, she'd read me offending passages and then fling the paper across the room when she was finished. Other days, she'd drop it in my lap and ask plaintively, "Why can't you do something about this?"

After telling her that my lowly position didn't permit me a say in the matter, I'd tell her that we younger folk talked politics with Bob all the time, and despite our making no headway whatsoever, we still thought of him as one of the sweetest guys around and great company besides.

Then one day the Simons accidentally met the Currans at a restaurant. They sat down and had a drink while we finished dinner. When they went off to their own table, the Curran's Corner-flinger said: "You were right. He's great." She didn't stop seething at his column or flinging it across the room, mind you, but it was always followed by an affectionate, indulgent smile.

For the better part of a decade, it was my strange luck to share a phone with Bob -- which meant that I functioned as his daytime secretary. I took pride in my role as message taker and accidental schmoozer with the regulars at Curran's Corner. My favorite was an old classmate of his at Boston Latin School who told me proudly, "I've known Bob so long that I remember when he opened his mouth when he talked."

Everyone who has ever known Bob can sit you down and tell Curran stories of one sort or another. If they're lucky, they have an evening's worth of them.

There are words for people whose names are always dropped by others, usually as preludes to rollicking narrative. One of those words is "legend."

If you look at Bob, you know that it just doesn't fit. He's too friendly and generous for such a word, a word that's at least 40 degrees chillier than the man we have been privileged to know.

"Gentleman" seems much easier to say, even though these days legends are thought to be a dime a dozen and true gentlemen are as scarce as saints.

Bob is one of them. His corner may now be closed after 32 years, but not his memory or his example. Lucky us.