I’m going to start with his singing.

When people gathered around a piano to sing, Tom Condon knew a great many lyrics, and he sang with conviction and joy.

And always significantly off-key.

Tom was good at so many different things that it may seem odd to begin this way; but when I sat down and let the news of his death spread over me, this is where I landed.

It usually sounded to me like Tom was singing more or less the correct intervals of a melody.  He just started on the wrong note. Standing next to him, you could get pulled away into his version by the gale force of his enthusiasm.

Remembering him today, I remember how happy he was with his awful singing, and it just tears my heart in half.

When I arrived at the Hartford Courant in 1976, Tom Condon was The Man.  He was the leader of a group of elite reporters known as the Bullpen. They took on big projects and produced great work and, when they weren’t doing those things, partied illustriously.

The whole Bullpen scene could feel like MacArthur and Hecht + 50 years, but there was nothing corny or stagey about the way Tom Condon went at it. He could do the investigations. He could do the big features. He was in the process of getting his law degree. It was a grave error, if he was reporting on you, to lie to Tom.  He had built himself into a muscular avenging angel when it came to that sort of thing.

I was a lowly, very green town reporter. Jon Sandberg and I had joined forces to make names for ourselves slightly ahead of schedule. The older and more experienced town reporters referred to us as the Gold Dust Twins, not entirely affectionately.

Anyone who looked closely could tell that one of the Twins was not like the other, was more focused, more energetic, more keen, more disciplined. That person was not me.

Somewhere around 1977, Tom, while working on one big project, was asked by the editors if he could weave in a second one, requiring a certain amount of investigation. Tom said he would only do it if somebody could be detailed to assist him, and the only acceptable people he could think of were Sandberg or McEnroe.

This was quite an honor, and Jon was busy with something else.

I was so, so, so deeply inadequate. If he were here right now, he would insist that was not the case. I know I’m right, because, over the years, I apologized many times for having been the equivalent of an albatross who swallowed a millstone, and he would never hear of it.

But I was an investigative reporter the way Tom was a singer, which is to say, not exactly. He never complained or made me feel bad.

Not that he had no edge.

It was impossible to know Tom in those days and not wonder what Vietnam had done to him. I think it was for him inexpressible while simultaneously a thing he wished he could express. He didn’t talk about it a lot, but he was in combat and in forward positions. When he first came home, it was inadvisable to wake him from sleep. If it had to be done, it was best done from a distance, gently poking him with a broom handle.

On just a few occasions, he abruptly tried to tell me a story about, say, a firefight.  It never seemed to have much of a point, which I think was kind of the point.

When he transitioned to writing columns, he adopted a novel approach. He tried to find the real truth of a thing and lay it out in 700 words. You might say that should not be considered a novel approach, but it really is. Hardly anybody was as interested in finding the truth as Tom Condon. He did it over and over, with economy and elegance, and he didn’t seem to mind if the truth departed significantly from the way he wished things were.

If everybody did journalism this way, the world would be a better place, and the profession would be held in higher esteem.  I’m not saying this because he’s gone.  I said it a lot in his lifetime.

I wasn’t one of his closest friends, but we worked on a lot of the same stories, drank a certain amount of beer, played in possibly too many softball games.

On the printed page was where I loved him the most. That clarity. That integrity.

But what I’d give a lot for, right now, is to stand next to him singing some old song, listening to his voice range into weedy places undreamt of by the songwriters from the Brill Building or Tin Pan Alley.

He’d be so happy.

Colin McEnroe is the host of the Colin McEnroe Show on WNPR, Connecticut Public.