Jocko Thomas, who passed away at 96, was the Toronto Star's crime reporter for 50 years.Richard Lautens
Crime reporter Gwyn (Jocko) Thomas, who died on Wednesday at age 96, was an avatar of the old school.
A classic form of a historic breed, he was a reporter's reporter, by turns crusty, tireless, generous, competitive, driven, cynical, resourceful, clever, and entirely self-made. He worked and played the only way he knew - hard and by his wits, which were considerable.
And if the news he was writing failed to deliver the requisite sizzle, he wasn't shy about adding more tasty condiments. "If we couldn't find a story, we'd find a way of creating [it]" he once said. "It was more entertainment then. You couldn't get away with it today. And if they gave awards for the biggest bloopers, I'd have a few of them."
In an interview, Toronto Police Chief William Blair said that Mr. Thomas had made an enormous impact on the city by "connecting the people to its police service."
"He was respected and admired, had remarkable connections, always got it right and often seemed to know more about a situation that anyone else, including the police," Chief Blair said. "In many respects, Jocko Thomas wrote the modern history of the Toronto Police Service."
The son of a Welsh father and Scottish mother, Mr. Thomas spent virtually his entire life in newspapers, starting as a newsboy on the streets of Toronto at the age of 12. By 16, with only one year of high school education, he was working as a copy boy at the Toronto Star - his print home for the next 55 years - earning six dollars a week.
He was one of the lucky ones. The stock market crashed the same month he joined the Star. Soon, the Great Depression descended; no one else in his family had a job. They were forced to root for food in other people's trash.
Jocko Thomas translated that visceral hunger into a hunger to succeed. Four years later, he got his lucky break, filling in for a missing reporter at county police court. His subsequent scoop, about a child molester, earned him promotion to the rewrite desk and, soon after, to the reporter ranks.
That same year, on Aug. 16, 1933, the cub reporter earned his first front-page story, covering the three-hour night of bloody rioting between Nazi sympathizers and Jews after a high school baseball game at Christie Pits. Twenty years old that day, he was the only Star reporter on the scene.
After stints working in Scarborough, East York and Leaside, Jocko (his nickname was said to have originated as a variation on Docko, which had been tagged to an older brother) was awarded the police beat. He stayed at it for 50 years, an almost unthinkable tour of duty in the modern business.
Loyalty must have been ingrained. He enjoyed an even longer run in marriage: 59 years with his wife, Marjorie, who died in 1994. In the early days, she accompanied him to meetings, taking notes in shorthand on his behalf. Their union produced one son, Ron, now an Ontario Superior Court judge, and three grandchildren.
At one point in the 1960s, when the Star's interest in crime reporting temporarily faded, it was Marjorie who recommended that Mr. Thomas approach CFRB, and file his stories as radio bulletins. He kept at it for the next quarter-century, filing some 19,000 such reports, and ending each of them with his signature sign-off, complete with rolled r's: "This is Jocko Thomas of the Toronto Star reporting to CFRB from police headquar-r-r-rters." But his print byline always read, "By Gwyn (Jocko) Thomas."
Over the years, Mr. Thomas won nine local awards and three National Newspaper Awards, including one for a 1951 death row interview in which San Quentin inmate Stanley Buckowski confessed to three Toronto murders; two other awards involved local fraud and corruption. He was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame in 1995.