In a remarkable essay that he wrote for the Boston Globe’s Sunday magazine in July 2021 announcing that his doctors had told him he had but a few months to live, Jack Thomas took stock of his life with a grace that defied the reality behind the accounting. He did what the King told Alice in Wonderland about telling a story: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.”

Jack, a Neponset native, reached the end of his personal story over the weekend, passing away at age 83 at his home in Cambridge with his tightly knit family comforting him from close by. Did this warm-hearted and gentle man fight against the dying of the light? “Yes, he did,” said his wife, Geri Denterlein. “He really wanted to stay around.”

As beginnings go, Jack was single minded from early on. In the essay, he wrote: “Some people grow into adulthood confused about a career, but I was lucky. From age 14, I wanted to be a newspaperman. Although my father never graduated from high school and worked long hours for a meager salary as a machinist, and although my mother raised five children and mopped floors nights at Filene’s, and although our family lived at the edge financially and dressed in hand-me-downs, the one thing never in short supply at our house was the newspaper — four a day, the Boston Post, the Globe, the Boston American, and the Daily Record.

“In my working-class Boston neighborhood, at age 14, I delivered the weekly newspaper, the Dorchester Argus, and the daily Hearst tabloid, the Record, paying 3.4 cents per copy and selling each for a nickel, a profit of 1.6 cents per paper, plus whatever tips I could finagle.” He concluded with this: “I’ve had the privilege of having spent more than 60 years working for newspapers. There was not a day when it wasn’t a pleasure to go to work.”

And later in his reminiscence: “Till now, life’s been grand. I was blessed to write for a newspaper, a career H. L. Mencken described as the life of kings. I was a teenager when I began to work for the Globe as a copy boy in sports, followed by beats as police reporter, State House reporter, city editor, editorial writer, Washington correspondent, national correspondent, television critic, feature writer, and ombudsman. My first story was in 1958, so publication of this essay today marks the eighth decade that my writing has appeared in the Globe.”

For those, like me, who worked alongside Jack Thomas for many years over the course of his six decades or so with the Globe, and for those of us here at the Dorchester Reporter and BostonIrish.com, there was not a day when it wasn’t a pleasure to join with him in our common enterprise of telling stories.

A soft-spoken man who took time away from newspapering to join the US Marines as a reservist, Jack spread out his talents, beginning with reporting stints at the Everett Leader Herald & News-Gazette and the Haverhill Journal before joining the Globe fulltime in 1962. From then until his retirement in 2005, he was an integral part of a Globe that grew steadily in circulation and influence as the newspaper began to identify itself editorially and in its reporting as a “progressive journal.”

Jack signed onto that mission with the deep conviction that a newspaper, especially a large one like The Globe, should be a force in its community that would seek out injustices and confront them, loudly if necessary, that would listen to those demanding change as citizens, not troublemakers, that would speak and advocate for those whose voices were denied attention. Over his long career, and with his many influential beats, he held onto those beliefs with a practiced eye, his typewriter (and then his keyboard) at the ready. He also just told stories, a countless number, because he liked to.

At the Dorchester Reporter and BostonIrish.com (nee the Boston Irish Reporter), he was a natural resource after he finished his full-time role up Morrissey Boulevard from our offices at the entrance to Columbia Point. Over the course of the last decade, he reported deeply on, and wrote elegantly, and at length about, individuals and families of Irish heritage who were receiving Irish Honors at BostonIrish.com’s annual October luncheon.

The lives he chronicled included those of Boston hotelier Jim Carmody, Dorchester’s street priest, the Rev. Richard ‘Doc’ Conway, the family of Joe Leary of the Irish American Partnership, the Brett family, and many others. He also profiled The Forry family when the Reporter Newspaper Co. celebrated its 25th anniversary.

In each case, the subjects of his pieces and their families came to know well Jack Thomas the newspaperman and to marvel at the care he brought to every last word he wrote and to the insights he drew from their stories.

In a time when brio has become the norm across media, especially in the social realm, how a good writer uses graciousness in interviewing and keen attention to what is said, and to what is implied, to produce uplifts of prose and fetching information is something for both writers and readers to savor.

Jack Thomas seemed to have appreciated that from the beginning of his time with newspapers. He kept at it until the end, and then he stopped, having lived the lesson that the printed word, when used with care and clarity and generosity of spirit, can make a difference.