The Times-Picayune’s Angus Lind has a great column recapping the career of Walt Philbin, the TP’s talented and endlessly colorful cops reporter, who just retired. When I went to work for the TP in the 1980s, Walt – who was in his early 40s at the time and had only been there about a decade – looked like something out of an earlier era, or, more precisely, one man’s cockeyed interpretation of the way things had been 30 or 40 years earlier. In a newsroom with more than its share of eccentrics, he stood out for his sense of style (rumpled, yes, but inimitable) his gentleness and sense of humor, and his uncanny talent at working sources at the most appalling crime scenes imaginable. If you went anywhere with Walt, his beeper – on the loudest possible setting – was constantly going off, and he’d whip it off his belt in a near-frenzy. Sometimes it was a source. But two thirds of the time, it was one of his relatives checking in.

Lind recalls an iconic Philbin anecdote, a deadline situation with editor Billy Rainey:

On one infamous occasion, Philbin came back into the newsroom very animated after covering some story andRainey asked him, “Whatcha got, Walt?” Philbin pulled out a notebook, looked down at his illegible chicken scratch, began to stammer and stutter and was running all the facts together in his inimitable stream-of-consciousness, free-flow, out-of-order sequence.

So Rainey, ever resourceful, took a drag on his cigarette and shouted at him: “Philbin, go back to your desk and pick up the phone!”

“No,” Walt continued, “but you know, and then, but after, but before, I mean, this is what happened, and then they . . .”

“Philbin, dammit, get back to your desk and pick up the (bleeping) phone!” Rainey shouted.

Philbin dutifully headed back to his desk, mumbling and muttering the whole way. When he got to his desk, he picked up the phone.

Rainey shouted across the newsroom, “Now call me!”

Which is what Philbin did. Back then, we were all much more comfortable dictating from the field, and he was much better on the phone. The words flowed, he had his facts, the best rewrite guy put it into a story, and the two miraculously met another tough deadline amid a loud, raucous and sometimes tense newsroom — where people smoked cigars and cigarettes, cussed and yelled, and laughed and drank together after work . . . and sometimes during.

By the time Walt Philbin started out, this world was already fading, and now it’s long gone, the stuff of old movies. But for some reason, he never seemed out of place as journalism changed around him.

(Times-Picayune photo)