RIP Bill Gallo

He may have appeared to be 150 years old and his sensibilities were maybe even older than that, but I can't remember a day growing up that I didn't see one of his cartoons in the morning paper or a Sunday without his article about talking boxing or Yankees in some barber shop that probably existed in the 50's. The cartoons were not actually funny and they usually stated the obvious, but they still had an old fashioned charm to them, and were kind of comforting in a mostly cynical sports world. While smart alecks like us here at PTU spend most of our days thinking of new ways to hate on the athletes we watch, or rant about the things that piss us off, Gallo would just draw another harmless cartoon like this:



That's not particularly funny or insightful. It just says that LeBron will probably be hiding next time he returns to Cleveland because the fans will be mad at him. That's it. But that's the era that Gallo was from; not a post-modern, extra sarcastic internet journalist who would probably place LeBron in a larger context, or purposely exaggerate the evilness of a young athlete (even if he did unintentionally make Bron look like Bin Laden) who left for another basketball team, just tellin' it like it is: LeBron left the Cavs, and now the fans in Cleveland will be mad at him. He also had a bunch of old timey characters who spoke like they were straight out of Our Gang: Basement Bertha, General Von Steingrabber (which Steinbrenner supposedly hated and then grew to love), lil Yuchie and maybe his favorite, two kids talking sports on a stoop or in a candy store. He also had a lot of out dated ideas in his cartoons like the fed up housewife in the apron who's husband is glued to the tv watching sports or even the idea that two kids would sit on a stoop or in a candy store and talk about anything as opposed to being on facebook or twitter or texting each other. He probably never heard of Twitter and that's cool. Unlike gas-bags like Lupica who force their sappy nostalgia for the good old days, this really was what Gallo was about. An old-school New York sports guy who wasn't anything like most of us, but that's exactly why he'll be missed.

RIP Bill Gallo.