The death of Arthur O. Sulzberger of the New York Times is a sad moment for those of us who love classical newspapering. We have had our innings with the Times, and your editor, apart from the Sun, found a joyous career at the Wall Street Journal. Yet over a long period of time, we have maintained a warm admiration for the man who guided the Times during much of previous generation. The Sulzberger family bested many of its competitors, stuck with its paper through collapsing equity values, and is now leading the industry onto the World Wide Web, all while hewing to the ideal of nepotism in the best sense of fidelity to family.

We met Arthur Sulzberger personally only once. It was part way through the run of the Sun in print, when we got a phone call from one of our columnists, Pranay Gupte, a veteran of the Times. “Guess who reads the Sun,” he said. We know all three of them by name, we quipped. “No, seriously,” he said. “Punch Sulzberger.” We told Mr. Gupte we were genuinely touched to hear that. “His wife, Allison Cowles, reads it, too,” Mr. Gupte  told us. So Mr. Gupte extended the Sun’s invitation to dinner. Sulzberger told Mr. Gupte they would be delighted. Some weeks followed without a date, however, and back came word that Sulzberger was feeling too frail for restaurant going and wondered whether we would join him for lunch at the Times.

It was a memorable, even moving meal. It was a chance for an outsider to see Sulzberger’s graciousness in person and to glimpse, via his regard for Mr. Gupte, the warmth of his appreciation of his great employees, even former ones. It was a chance to gain a sense of Sulzberger’s own love of newspapers. He talked with great animation not only about the Times but about the other papers the company owned. It was also a chance for us to thank him for the Times company’s willingness to include the Sun among the papers it distributed at the wholesale level, not that he was involved in such a decision. He was full of questions, and encouragement, about the Sun. His encouragement meant more to us than he might have guessed.

We didn’t get into any of the political issues, though our list of differences is long, from Vietnam to Cuba to Israel to tax rates to . . . well, sitting with Sulzberger in his private dining room, we found ourselves concerned about very little of that. We kept thinking that for all its errors the Times had many great triumphs. Its greatest is that it has survived so many of its rivals and so many temptations to let the company pass outside of the control of the family. It has managed to hang on. For his own generation Sulzberger handled all that in a way that made even his political adversaries like him. It’s something about which to think in our age of polarization and cynicism and rapid change.