Before slipping into a deep and final sleep, he asked for me, and I sat with him on Monday night and Tuesday night.

I spoke louder than usual, assuming, with complete illogic, that since he was sick, his hearing must have gone south.

What Used to be

I spoke, incessantly it seemed, of sunnier times, when we worked together at a long-gone newspaper in Orange County and later at the also long-gone Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

I rambled on about our four-person staff in Orange County, a decade together that he had commemorated with a large black and white portrait on the family’s living room wall in Laguna Hills.

He also surrounded himself with hundreds of clippings, his and mine, from the old days.

Lying prone, spindly, mouth involuntarily open, eyes at almost half-mast, I thought I detected acknowledgement of my rambling, but it probably was wishful thinking.

He Was the Binding

In Orange County, Walter was our head-down rock. He kept the newspaper together while the rest of us went out and covered events. Never sick. Never late. Never varying. The newspaper died shortly after he left.

Walt Marlow, it shall be recorded, was a giant of his craft,.

Through his remarkably knowledgeable pen, my Canadian-born friend put big-time ice hockey on the map in Southern California in the 1960s, writing with expertise, first, about the minor league Los Angeles Blades, and then, starting in 1967, the Los Angeles Kings.

The trouble was that Walter specialized in a sport that was and is a mystery to a huge number of Southern Californians.

In addition to playing as if the sport had just been introduced to them yesterday, the Kings drew poorly. Every year.

Odd Canadians

Walter never tired of repeating the most famous line of Jack Kent Cooke, the original owner of the Kings. Referring to the several million transplanted Canadians living in Southern California, Mr. Cooke once concluded that “they all must have left Canada because they hated hockey.”

But this morning it is Walter’s turn.

Unlike many contemporary journalists, Walter never came close to receiving his deserved credit because unlike most of his more aggressive peers, he was content to remain in the background.

Walter was gentle, at home and in the office.

The attraction, he always understood — and it is one of his several golden legacies — was the players or the game or another event. Not him. He was only the messenger, luminous though he was.

Plain Talking with His Typewriter

Without frills, he related stories with the kind of clarity that escapes many of us and with a level of expertise and insight that eludes almost all of us.

He was an old-time newspaperman, a Hall of Famer, in his craft and in his home. He and Blanche raised a three-child family according to the strictures of the God they worshipped, and his many writing responsibilities never interfered with family.

Getting Personal

Our relationship, born at the long forgotten Orange County Evening News in Garden Grove, eventually transcended the newsrooms and entered our homes.

Especially in recent years.

When Diane and I visited on a Saturday night last month, Walter was dressed and sitting in his favorite easy chair near the window, breathing with the aid of a respirator, Sparky, the World’s Gentlest Dog, parked contentedly at his feet.

He did not look very different from the way he did for our visits in October, November, December. But January was different. We talked hockey. We talked old times and some new times. We talked about the death of longtime rival/colleague Stu Nahan.

A Few Differences

Suffering pretty silently with incurable pulmonary fibrosis, which stiffens the lungs, Walter took pride in outlasting his old adversary.

Now they were a pair. Flashy Stu, the most talkative voice in the press box, and the most talked to, made his living on television. My friend Walter, the poster boy for unassuming, dressed as modestly as Flashy Stu did not, shunned attention as Flashy Stu did not, and knew more about hockey than the next 10 people in Southern California, or Canada.

Modesty always finishes second to flashiness — except when it counts.

The Last Goodbye

When Walter, Blanche, his daughter Charlaine, and, I believe, one of his two sons, shoomzed with Diane and me for a few hours last month, Walter knew it was our final farewell.

There were too many warning signs.

I assured him we would be back for his birthday, Feb. 9. He knew better. In earlier years, we all would do dinner on Saturday night of birthday week.

When Diane and I left their brightly lighted, well-prepared home this past Tuesday night, Charlaine said that even if her father did not survive, please come back on Saturday night to celebrate his life.

And so we shall.