Joe Mooshil, a revered Chicago reporter who covered college and professional sports for four decades, died Friday, Sept. 7, his family said. He was 85.
Mr. Mooshil died of sepsis and complications of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, according to his daughter, Maria,
On Saturday, friends and family remembered him as a gruff-voiced master of the sports world who nearly always had a cigar in his mouth, but whose tough exterior melted around those he loved.
"He was basically an encyclopedia of Chicago sports," recalled Paul Sullivan, the Tribune's veteran baseball reporter. "He was a classic, old-school sportswriter. It was hard to believe that anyone could write on deadline as sharply as he did. He made it look easy. He never got flustered."
Mooshil's daughter said he was attracted to sportswriting after reading the book "Farewell to Sport" by Paul Gallico, an acclaimed sportswriter for the New York Daily News who famously gave up the craft in favor of fiction writing. She said her father was intrigued by Gallico's accounts of covering Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
"He said, 'I thought that sounded great,'" his daughter said.
He was hired by the Associated Press in 1952 and worked for a year in Huntington, W.Va., before returning to Chicago, his daughter said. He began his career as a sportswriter in 1953, covering every professional team in Chicago and several college teams.
Dave van Dyck, another Tribune baseball writer, said he met Mr. Mooshil in the 1970s.
"Joe Mooshil was kind of scary to us young guys because he had this gruff demeanor," van Dyck said, chuckling. "Anything he said, he said it with this gruff and booming voice. But once you got to know him, he was just the opposite."
Van Dyck also recalled Mr. Mooshil's persistence as a reporter.
"I can remember many times coaches and managers getting really mad at him because he kept asking the same question over and over again until they really answered it," van Dyck said. "He would never let them get off easy."
Late in his career, he became more widely known among Chicago sports fans for his frequent appearances on the popular radio-then-television show "The Sportswriters," a veritable round table featuring some of the profession's most acclaimed figures talking shop.
Mr. Mooshil was "the guy with the hair," Maria Mooshil said, laughing in a reference to her father's classic Assyrian features.
By the time he retired in 1993, Mr. Mooshil had a loyal following among sport fans in Chicago, even those who were frequent targets of his unforgiving reporting style.
"The Chicago sports scene has lost a member of the Old Guard ... with the passing of Joe Mooshil," Chicago Bulls and White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said in a statement Saturday. "It's probably fitting in a way that he passed away on a fall weekend filled with sports events, because Joe covered them all during his long and honor-filled career."
Mr. Mooshil and his wife, Claire, would have celebrated their 51st wedding anniversary Sunday.
The couple met in 1955 at a bar called Figaro's, a place many of her friends and acquaintances frequented. When Mr. Mooshil expressed an interest in meeting Claire, he was told he couldn't approach her on his own.
"People said, 'Oh, we'll have to introduce you to her because she doesn't talk to just anybody,'" Maria Mooshil said.
The pair married and had three daughters, who were raised in the West Rogers Park neighborhood. Summertime traditions included driving to apple orchards and going to Foster Avenue Beach.
His daughter also said her father would occasionally bring one the girls downtown to the AP offices at 188 W. Randolph St. on Thursday — payday — then they'd stop by a bar called the Pink Poodle.
"After he took us upstairs to get his check, we would have Shirley Temple cocktails," she recalled.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Mooshil is survived by two other daughters, Leah Mooshil Durst and Angele Mooshil Butler; a brother; and five grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
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