Thomas J. Condon, a newspaperman who for more than 50 years told Connecticut’s stories, fought injustices and challenged public policies with grace and unimpeachable authority, died early Tuesday. He was 78.
He died after a recurrence of cancer.
Condon’s career in journalism was almost entirely conducted at The Hartford Courant, where he started work in 1970 after a short tour in Vietnam. He retired from The Courant at the end of 2015 and wrote regularly for The Connecticut Mirror since then.
Condon was the rare journalist who was deeply respected and admired by colleagues, readers and elected officials alike. Former colleagues described him at various points in his career as “The Courant’s Rock of Gibraltar,” the “wit and conscience” of The Courant and “a Connecticut institution.” He won award after award, including the Yankee Quill and membership in the New England Newspaper Hall of Fame, and the editorial he wrote on Dec. 14, 2012 after the Sandy Hook shooting was described as “a masterpiece.”
But his beginnings in print journalism were somewhat accidental.
After graduating from St. Bernard High School in his home town of New London in 1964, Condon enrolled at the University of Notre Dame. He’d had some experience in broadcast journalism in high school — doing color for basketball games and the Yale-Harvard regatta on the local radio station — and thought to give it a go at Notre Dame.
“They were having trials for the student radio station the next day, and then the following week were tryouts for the student newspaper,” Condon said in a recent interview. “Well, the next day, I came down with a vicious case of laryngitis. I had to wave my hand — and it got me into this.”
Condon went on to write for the student newspaper, The Observer, and later for a humor magazine on campus called The Leprechaun.
“It was then that it occurred to me that you could make a living at this — not a princely living, perhaps, but a living. OK, so, long story short, I did it,” he said.
Condon joined the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps for his last two years at Notre Dame and went to Vietnam shortly after graduation in 1968. He returned to his parents’ home in New London one cold day in October 1970, he said, “took a shower, went to bed and got up the day after the following day.”
Soon thereafter, Condon drove to The Courant’s main office, where he’d been in touch with editors about a job before he’d left for Vietnam, and was offered a job as a reporter in the Old Saybrook news bureau.
“I really liked The Courant” at the time, Condon said. “The people were great.”
He recalled how former managing editor Reid MacCluggage, who was the state editor at the time, would “call me up and say ‘Hey, there’s a great story down in Fairfield or New Haven or New York City … Why don’t you pick it up on your way to work.’ … And there was some great stuff. … If you’re not pumping stories out of New Haven, you’re not paying attention.”
While he was pumping out stories, he enrolled at the University of Connecticut School of Law and got his law degree, taking classes at night.
“My father was a lawyer, and I actually thought if I became a lawyer or not, the knowledge-slash-information would be helpful to me, whatever I did. That turned out to be true.”
The Courant gave him the OK to practice law one day a week at what was then called Neighborhood Legal Services in Hartford, “on the second floor over a cheesy pharmacy that would frequently catch on fire.”
But he was soon dispatched to New Haven, where he opened The Courant’s New Haven news bureau.
Condon became a force at The Courant during the next few decades. After a few months in New Haven, The Courant created a pool of general assignment reporters known as “The Bullpen.” The group included Mark Melady, whom Condon described as “one of the best, if not the best, national writers at The Courant.” Their charge: “Pick a story and do it,” Condon said.
The experiment didn’t last too long, Condon said, “because Irving didn’t like it.” Irving Kravsow was the managing editor at the time. “He was the author of this quote: ‘Too much bull, not enough pen.’”
Condon went on to serve on The Courant’s first investigative team and was a columnist for nearly two decades, for years writing three columns every week.
In 2003, Condon joined The Courant’s editorial department. John Zakarian, the editorial page editor at the time, wrote about Condon: “Name it and he’s done it … Among Tom’s causes as a columnist and a reporter were the championing of a strong-mayor form of government in Hartford, historic preservation, transportation alternatives, open space preservation — and driving the Spillane towing company out of town.”
Perhaps Condon’s most effective work involved the case of Shawn Henning and Ralph “Ricky” Birch, who were sentenced to 50 and 55 years in prison for a 1985 murder. Condon was convinced they were wrongly convicted and, over the course of many years, did the reporting to back it up. The state Supreme Court reversed their convictions in 2019, and they have sued the state.
Condon also relentlessly probed the circumstances surrounding the conviction of Richard Lapointe, a man who was found guilty of murdering an elderly relative. When the conviction was finally overturned in 2015, Condon wrote the editorial.
“Having ruined his life for the past three decades, the least the state can do now is provide him with the resources to spend his last years in some comfort. His conviction was an outrage,” the editorial reads. “The case was so riddled with mistakes, inconsistencies and questions that it should never have been brought in the first place.”
After he left The Courant, Condon continued to write for the CT Mirror, exploring some of the state’s quirkiest corners. Most recently, he wrote — mostly from a hospital bed — a story about the former Seaside Sanatorium. He’d also written about the trouble with four-way intersections, small-town managerial quandaries and a tree that grows in the middle of a road in Canton.
For his induction into the New England Newspaper & Press Association Hall of Fame in 2016, the association wrote: “Tom’s writing is so powerfully persuasive that it inevitably wins justice. … He challenged authority and mentored young reporters. He dug deep and wrote with grace and style. As a singular columnist and as the chief voice of The Courant, Tom was a force to reckon with. He kept them honest. And when they were dishonest, he exposed them.”
Former Courant and CT Mirror colleagues echoed the praises.
Claude Albert, a former executive editor at the CT Mirror and a former managing editor at The Courant, worked with Condon at both news organizations.
“As a reporter, columnist and editorial writer for more than 50 years, Tom produced an incredibly deep, diverse and impactful body of work that set him apart in modern Connecticut journalism. He started reporting in the era of the Linotype machine and lead type and finished in the time of social media and the tweet. He knew the state and its citizens better than almost anyone, and they were blessed that he spent his career chronicling their civic life,” Albert said.
“Tom had all the components of character that produce great journalism. He had a relentless devotion to the truth, both in its broad stokes and in detail. He was impeccably fair. He had compassion for the harmed or the struggling and was indignant over those who took unfair advantage of others or abused the public trust,” he added.
Elizabeth Hamilton, executive editor of the CT Mirror and a former reporter at The Courant, said she and other editors viewed every story with Condon’s byline as a gift — a joy to read, easy to edit and a boon to readers. His love of storytelling was palpable in the work.
“During my final conversation with Tom, shortly before he died, he pitched two stories he still wanted to write and sketched out the top of one of them, off the top of his head,” Hamilton said. “He was a reporter down to his bones and one of the kindest people I’ve ever worked with.”
MacCluggage, Condon’s editor at The Courant, said Condon “was the straw that stirred the drink” in the Bullpen.
“He had fun! He enjoyed life, and he was an Irish storyteller,” MacCluggage said. “Here was a guy with just remarkable talents who stayed a reporter all of his career … He was a once-in-a-generation reporter.”
One morning in 1976, MacCluggage said, he and a few others from the newsroom joined Condon — a die-hard Red Sox fan — on a trip to the Bronx for the opening of the newly refurbished Yankee Stadium. They took the train out of Hartford, but it broke down somewhere in Westchester County.
“They told us not to get off the train, but we were headed to a ballgame,” MacCluggage said.
The group was stranded near an office complex, but they spotted a limousine waiting for an executive. Condon and the others convinced the executive to let them ride along with her — “as long as they drop me off first,” she said — and continue to Yankee Stadium, where it deposited them in front of a curious crowd of Yankee fans.
“Tom just had a joy of life,” MacCluggage said.
Lou Golden, a former deputy publisher and vice president who said he was Condon’s editor “every once in a while” earlier in his career, said Condon’s natural curiosity and ability to listen were keys to his work. The listening, he said, paid off.
“He knew Connecticut — it was in his soul, and it came out in the way he reported,” Golden said. “He cared deeply about the state, understood the people here, the Connecticut idiosyncrasies. He had a voice that resonated with the state, a voice in his writing. He knew so much — he was so authoritative.”
David Fink, a colleague in the opinion department, said Condon has “shown how a very wise, well-read, friendly and unpretentious guy can help people better understand their world, appreciate each other, and recognize the value of a free press and the First Amendment.
“There are thousands of people in Connecticut who respect responsible news organizations and the work journalists do because they got to know a lovely, funny, thoughtful but regular guy named Tom Condon,” he said.
Carolyn Lumsden, the opinion editor when Condon retired, said, “Tom wrote like an angel. He had the wit of a devil. He was the most decent of men and among the best reporters this state has ever been blessed with. He loved this state fiercely, and he did so much good for it.
“He got innocent men freed from prison. He got state police to tape interrogations. He delighted all of Connecticut with lines like, ‘As Shakespeare might have said, what a piece of work is Jim Calhoun.’
“He wrote at his retirement that ‘I estimate that I have reported for work about 10,800 times and can’t recall a day when I didn’t look forward to it.’”
Steve Metcalf, a former music critic at The Courant, said, “Tom knew so much about so many things, and was himself good at so many things, that it sometimes seemed that he was actually several people.
“We all know about his gifts as a journalist, of course, but as fewer people know, he excelled on the tennis court and the softball diamond. He read widely. He knew a great deal about popular music, particularly early rock ‘n’ roll. In the days before Wikipedia, if you momentarily forgot who sang ‘The Duke of Earl’ or ‘There’s a Moon Out Tonight,’’ a quick call to Tom would set you straight. He even knew show tunes. At a singalong party many years ago, I was astonished when, off the top of his head, he barked out in its entirety ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl.’”
Regarding his tennis game, Condon would say: “People ask me how I play tennis on those knees. And I tell them, ‘Badly.’”
But not all of his legacy sparkled. Many of his Courant colleagues quietly rued the winter day when, with roads all but impassable, Condon shamed them all by snowshoeing to work.
Along the way, in the early 1980s, Condon met Anne McGrath, a bureau reporter. They worked on a project together on the diet industry. McGrath left The Courant for the Associated Press in 1983, she said. But they started dating in 1985 and were married in 1987.
In addition to his wife Anne, Condon is survived by two children, Clare Condon-Grade of Wallingford and John (Jack) Condon of Chicago; a son-in-law, Aaron Grade; his brother Garret Condon and his wife Daria Caruso Condon of West Hartford; his sister Deirdre Wyeth of New York City; his sisters-in-law Virginia McGehee of Colchester, Vt., Sherri V. Condon of New London, Maureen McGrath of East Haddam and Margaret DiScipio of Falls Church, Va., and their spouses, James Manfredi and Joseph DiScipio; eight nieces and two nephews. Four siblings and two brothers-in-law died previously.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
This story was originally published Sept. 10, 2024 by the Connecticut Mirror.
