Abe Rosenthal loomed large in my life for four decades. It is hard to think of him as gone.

He was my guru. And, I am not shy to say, he was my hero.

Just as no day goes by when I do not think of my parents and the lovely childhood they created for me in Bombay, no day goes by when I do not think of Abe and the wonderful career in American journalism that he gifted me.

I cannot imagine what life would have been had I not been a journalist. I cannot imagine a sturdier role model in journalism than Abe Rosenthal.

He always believed that journalism should be fun, and that if you weren’t enjoying it to the hilt, then you ought to be doing something else.

There’s a myth in some circles about how Abe and I first met. That myth has it that he “discovered” me among India’s royalty during his assignment as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times in India, and persuaded me to come to America to join his beloved paper.

It is just that, a myth. I would have had to be a real prodigy for Abe to discover me – I was barely 8 years old. And royalty? I have sometimes longed to be bathed in saffron-flavored warm milk by nubile maidens – but no such luck.

It was not in a maharajah’s palace but in the newsroom of the Times in the summer of 1968 that I first saw Abe. I was working there as a copy boy, down in New York from Brandeis University in Massachusetts for a three-month stint. He wasn’t the top editor then, but on his way. I still remember his owlish face, his stern expression, and his unkempt appearance.

Many years later, after he’d become executive editor (and also acquired a tailor in the process), I would think of Abe during that summer. He once addressed a group of us summer interns about his journalism. There was nary a reference to his Pulitzer Prize, nor to the many dozens of exotic places with mellifluous names whence he’d filed prose that usually read like poetry.

Instead, Abe spoke to us about technical stuff – the importance of taking detailed notes, of noting the local flora and fauna, of jotting down people’s appearances, what they wore and how they wore it. He spoke to us about the craft of journalism, about accuracy and fairness and scrupulousness. He spoke to us about being always truthful.

It was his romance with newspapering that came through most clearly.

Abe was besotted with the idea that a newspaper would send a man – or a woman – to distant places, armed only with a notebook and a typewriter, to report on how people lived, and then pay that correspondent to send dispatches back to the newsroom.

He was besotted, too, with how those dispatches were transformed in the newsroom through editing and the linotype machine into newspaper pages. When I served as his news clerk for a three-year period after graduation, I sometimes saw him holding that day’s paper and just staring at it. Abe told me once that holding a paper fresh off the presses was like holding a newborn baby in his hands.

If that comment showed a sense of continuing wonder about journalism, it also suggested puzzlement – and sometimes impatience – with those who did not share Abe’s romantic view.

As his clerk, I was privy to his many moods, some of them quite dark. He was certainly hard on people, although no harder than he was on himself. But if you were a newspaperman, even one who did not work for the Times, Abe almost always regarded you with affection.

That affection was allocated in different measures, of course. Abe prized loyalty to the Times, and he was proudly intolerant of those who denigrated the paper. He prized hard work, imagination, enterprise, and resourcefulness.

Most of all, Abe prized honesty and fairness.

In the last interview he ever gave – which was to me for The New York Sun – Abe said: “Let it always be said of me that ‘He kept the paper straight.'”

Yes, Abe Rosenthal kept his New York Times straight because he was a superb technician. But he made the paper’s reputation soar because he edited from the gut.

But the gratitude of institutions is rarely unlimited. The very paper that he savored and saved ultimately tossed him out – a cold political act that bewildered Abe. He took it personally, and, in the end, it broke his heart.

There are a lot of things that I would have wanted to write about Abe, but writing about him in the past tense isn’t one of them.

He honored me by being my mentor. He honored me by giving me a start in American journalism. He honored me by coming into my life when I was an impressionable young man, very new to America and its extraordinary society, and staying in my life to guide me through its vicissitudes.

Abe Rosenthal always loomed large in my life with his wisdom, his perceptions, his laughter, his infectious love of the printed word and what it takes to get that word into print.

Is he really gone? I don’t think so.