? I went to visit Tom early in the morning, before the doctors arrived to check the growth of the cancer that had come back with lethal intent.

It was my last visit and I knew it, but the nurse stopped me at the doorway and asked me in that voice of pleasant authority: “Are you a member of the family?”

She was screening people, but I looked her in the face and without skipping a beat, I said: “I’m one of his kids.” The funny part is that it was true.

I was one of Tom Winship’s kids. In 1967, he had barely begun his tenure as legendary editor of The Boston Globe. He hired me  he adopted me  at the height of the miniskirted, counterculture, revolutionary ’60s. I became one of the fully-grown reporters that he picked using the one human-resource tool he trusted: gut instinct.

Tom picked us kids, one at a time, whenever he wrangled another slot. He created a community, an extended, squabbling, engaged, caffeine-high bunch of reporters for a paper that would be better than the sum of its parts, greater than any one of us.

He offered me a job I didn’t want  on the women’s page  at a salary $10 lower than the other paper in town. It’s the best ten bucks I never made. This exuberant, irrepressible life force, who died Thursday at 81, was the editor, the mentor, the pal, the engine behind a “writer’s paper” that became world class.

How do you describe an editor and life force to those who weren’t lucky enough to work for one? For the 19 years he ran the Globe, this man in a seersucker suit with a bow tie and suspenders would walk through the city room, slap you on the shoulder, and ask, “You havin’ any fun?”

When was the last time a boss asked you that? His old pal, Ben Bradlee, who soldiered with him as a Washington reporter in the post-World War II years, said they were both determined to make a difference and have fun doing it.

What difference does a person make? I could count the Pulitzers. I could tell you about covering civil rights and women’s rights when other papers were tiptoeing around these issues.

I could tell you about his “kids” of every description who now pepper the staffs of great newspapers across this country. I could tell you about how many lifetime friendships and marriages took place under his wing and roof. But how do you describe the Greatest Generation guy with the amazing ability to keep going forward, to stay connected to the next thing?

The first time I ever had lunch with Tom, he took me to the fancy and venerable Ritz. He ordered bouillabaisse, we talked, and when the waiter came around again, he said, “Mr. Winship, can I get you anything else?” Tom turned around casually and said, “Yeah, you know, I’d like seconds.” Seconds at the Ritz. I never got over it.

My irrepressible pal carried small paper cards stuck in his pockets with story ideas. Out of every 10 ideas, three were completely cockeyed. Two, as another Winship kid, Bob Turner, would say, had already been in the paper. Two more were just OK. And three would knock your socks off.

In these days, corporations run most newspapers. Editors have to go to think tanks where the managers pass out copies of “Who Moved My Cheese?” The corporations spend months working up mission statements. Everyone fills out forms about targeted goals. The editors are beholden to publishers who are beholden to stockbrokers. But the best of the newspaper people still believe in taking risks.

Tom was the best of them. He believed in taking on the big guys. He believed in giving it a shot  what the hell, go get ’em. Even in his alleged retirement, he believed in newspapers. He believed in himself. He believed in his kids. And as a kid who had lost my own dad far too early, I basked in the certainty that he was on my side.

Most of us kids are well into middle age now, but I say without embarrassment that I still have my stash of his “tiger notes,” the scribbled words that he would send when you wrote something that tickled him. Tell the management gurus and the corporate incentive honchos and the stock-option-makers, I worked for those notes.

That last visit, I said to my old pal, “Tom, didn’t we have fun?” He opened his eyes and held my hand and said as clear as a bell: “You bet we did.” Before I left, he gave me a hug as he always did and said in my ear, “You were always my favorite.” And I smiled because I know he loved me, and I also know without a shadow of a doubt that he said that to all us kids.

I’m not so good at loss. Who is? I know how lucky we were. But I find it totally unacceptable that I won’t ever see this guy coming across the street in a straw hat to meet me for clams or sushi and his favorite main course, gossip.

Damn it, I want seconds.