After his discharge, he utilized for a job at The Instances and was employed largely on the energy of an essay he submitted detailing his hopes for a journalism profession. After a 12 months of clerical work, he wrote radio information bulletins for WQXR, The Instances’s AM and FM stations, then coated the police beat and common assignments.
His marriage to Kathleen Conniff in 1960 led to divorce within the early Nineteen Nineties. He married Ms. Mitchell in 1995, when she was the Metropolis Corridor bureau chief for The Instances, the 2 having met when she was the Moscow bureau chief for Newsday.
Along with Ms. Mitchell, he’s survived by his first spouse; 4 youngsters from his first marriage, John, Kevin, Michael and Laura Clines; and a sister, Eileen Lawrence. One other sister, Peggy Meehan Simon, died.
There are a lot of methods to deflate pomposity, which is one motive Mr. Clines relished overlaying the State Legislature in Albany. Past the drumbeat of recent legal guidelines and proposed taxes, he dissected the mores of lesser-light legislators with a Celtic sense of the absurd: their overblown rhetoric about public service, their crude consuming habits throughout debates, their dropping bouts with the mom tongue — all had been honest recreation and duly reported.
“I believe he was one of the best newspaper author of our time,” Charles Kaiser, a former Instances reporter, mentioned in a current e-mail. “His success mentioned extra concerning the paper’s dedication to stunning writing than the rest may.”
Mr. Clines as soon as wrote a New York Instances Journal article about Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, that will have been a sort of self-revelation, saying: “He fights to maintain issues primary, to remind himself of the easy knowledge of Finn MacCool, Eire’s mythic nationwide hero, that one of the best music on the planet is the music of what occurs. In his ‘Elegy,’ devoted to Lowell, Heaney reminded himself:
‘The way in which we live,
Timorous or daring,
Could have been our life.’”
