Francis X. Clines

Background

Francis X. Clines was born on February 7, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York, to Francis A. Clines, an accountant, and Mary Ellen (Lenihan) Clines.

Education

Clines attended Fordham University but dropped out in anticipation of being drafted into the army.

Career

Early in career, Clines pursued the job of a copy boy with the New York Times. Clines had enjoyed writing in high school, and the essay that accompanied his employment application was impressive enough to win him a spot in the editorial writing department of the Times in December 1958.

Clines worked at a variety of low-level writing jobs over a period of years. He was a cub reporter, night editor, and wrote copy for the Times radio station, WQXR. As a full-fledged reporter, beginning in 1958, he covered real estate news. He moved up to suburban reporting in 1965, covering Suffolk County and eastern Long Island. Clines returned to Manhattan in 1968 to write about welfare and poverty issues.

He began his political reporting career in 1970 when he was assigned to the capitol beat in Albany, and over his seven years there he developed his colorful and personal writing style. During his last two years, he served as Statehouse bureau chief. Clines returned to New York City in 1976 to work in the city hall bureau of the Times.

Legendary Times reporter Meyer Berger had begun the column “About New York” in the 1950s. Several other writers continued the column and assumed responsibility for the three essays a week. In late 1976 the newspaper was looking for a new columnist to continue writing in the style that had brightened the pages of the Times for so many years.

Clines had been an admirer of Berger and accepted the position. He approached the column as a reporter. He went out and got the story, then let his own personal writing flow from the facts. He sometimes wrote about news-related events, but most of Clines’ observations were of one single moment or place. He left his desk to explore the city, finding nuggets of New York life and documented them for his readers.

Clines had fun with columns such as “It Floats,” published on September 15, 1979, after his visit to the Port Ivory soap factory. He discovered and wrote about why Ivory floats and explained how the company came up with its original slogan, “99 44/100 pure.”

In 1979, after three years of writing “About New York,” Clines asked for another assignment. Writing nine hundred words three times a week had become tiring, and he was looking for a new challenge.

Clines joined the Washington, D.C., bureau of the Times, where he covered politics until June 1986. Clines then transferred to the newspaper’s London bureau where he first wrote as a foreign correspondent. He remained in London until 1988, when he briefly served with the Jerusalem bureau. In 1989, Clines became the Moscow correspondent for the Times. During his three years there, he covered the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the fall of Communism. He found it to be the hardest but most exciting assignment of his life. Clines returned to the Washington, D.C., bureau in 1995.

Achievements

• Well known for his foreign correspondence from London and Moscow, New York Times reporter Francis X. Clines established his reputation as a literary journalist in the late 1970s as the author of a long-running column, "About New York." In the course of three years, Clines reinvigorated the column with vivid prose that captured the colorful and varied life of city-dwellers, the poor and the rich, the forgotten and the influential. The best of his "About New York" columns were collected in 1980 in the book About New York.

Works

More photos

• publication

  • About New York 1980
  • Allen Ginsberg: Intimations of mortality 1984

Views

Clines talked to people at all levels of society, but he most enjoyed writing about New Yorkers from his own working-class background, the New Yorkers from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. He wrote about everyday people in everyday settings - a deli, a barbershop, a marriage bureau, a school for disadvantaged children. By seeking out news in those places in the city he would not normally frequent, Clines exposed himself to a constant stream of fresh experiences. His method resulted in personal narratives of rich descriptive prose that illuminated his subjects and cloaked them in poetic observation.

Clines also followed working women and men through their days, from Herbert Jacobs, who moved the cars of his Upper West Side clients before their street parking expired, to Jacques Français, a violin broker and restorer. In “Virtuoso” Clines wrote of the dreams of clients who brought in old violins found in attics, hoping Français would recognize a Stradivarius. Occasionally one did turn up and was carefully repaired and stored by Français. In “Birth by Remote Control,” Clines describes how a nurse on the city ambulance service switchboard talked a woman about to give birth through the ordeal.

Connections

Clines' first wife was Kathleen Conniff, but they divorced and Clines married, in 1995, Alison Mitchell, a reporter. Clines has four children.

Father:

Francis A. Clines

Mother:

Mary Ellen (Lenihan) Clines

ex-wife:

Kathleen Conniff

Wife:

Alison Mitchell