Legendary Post editor, mentor Michael Hechtman dies at 82
Michael Hechtman, a beloved and irascible New York Post editor who spent more than four decades at the tabloid, died Friday from lymphoma. He was 82.
The veteran newsman died in his sleep at Methodist Home for Nursing and Rehabilitation in the Bronx, according to his longtime friend, Shelagh Masline.
A night editor with a gallows humor and penchant for belting out Sondheim tunes, Hechtman mentored generations of reporters at The Post, giving scores of young journalists their first break, former colleagues and proteges said.
“I would have nothing without Mike — I would not have been a reporter,” said former Post journo Jennifer Fermino.
Hechtman infamously would have cub reporters sit beside him at his desk, where he would tear their stories to shreds to teach them how to write for the tabloid.
“One of the first things he would do is create a huge gap, six to seven spaces between your byline and what was your lede, because you were going to start over again,” said former Post reporter and Metro Editor Eric Lenkowitz.
Hechtman, he added, “gave everyone a shot” at the paper.
Michael Jay Hechtman was born in Brooklyn on April 5, 1942, to Henry Hechtman, a hat factory owner in the Garment District, and Rose Sass, a homemaker. His family soon moved to Rego Park, Queens, where he later would live for decades in a studio apartment without a stove.
He studied journalism at Brooklyn College, where he worked on the school newspaper, and later received a graduate degree from the University of Michigan, according to Masline.
He served in the US Army Reserves, where he handled writing press releases at Fort Dix in New Jersey, according to copy editor Milton Goldstein. He was honorably discharged in 1971.
Following reporting stints at the Hartford Courant and the Associated Press, Hechtman joined The Post in 1974 as a reporter, and soon cemented his status as “super rewrite man” — transforming street reporters’ harried notes into seamless prose.
“The night that [Yankees catcher] Thurman Munson died in the plane crash in the late 70s, [Post Publisher Rupert] Murdoch said I want your best man on this story,” former city editor Dick Belsky recalled. “Without hesitation we gave it to Hechtman.”
As a night editor, Hechtman gained notoriety for his tendency to wake up reporters with zero qualms at 2 a.m. to answer questions about their stories. He also had an uncanny ability to trim overwritten stories to their tabloid essence.
“He could take a 20-paragraph story and turn it into a haiku, that’s how good he was,” recalled former Post reporter Cynthia Fagen.
His newsroom eccentricities included regular bathroom announcements.
“He had this routine at night where he’d go to the bathroom and announce to the newsroom, ‘If Madonna calls for me, I’m in the middle stall,’ ‘If the Pope calls for me, I’m in the middle stall,’” Belsky recalled.
Fermino recalled Hechtman kept of collection of headlines that were “too rude” to go in the paper. And he once rewrote the lyrics of “Oklahoma!” to be about the Jewish new year: “Rosh Hashana, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains / and the matzoh ball stands proud and tall / we know we belong to the shul / and the shul we belong to is cool / and when we say vey, oy vey oy vey oy vey.”
Hechtman was passionate about the New York City transit system – and cats, combining his two loves by naming his many feline companions over the years after the city’s various rail systems and companies, including “BMT” for the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corp. and “Metro-North.”
He got his pilot’s license around 1979 following a trip to the South Pacific, and for a decade would fly friends and colleagues on a twin-engine Cessna for getaways to Newport and Martha’s Vineyard, Masline said.
After retiring in 2014, Hechtman returned to edit part-time at The Post, where he wrote the column “Weird But True.”
“Mike was New York City,” said former Post scribe Linda Massarella. “The five boroughs were like his own fingerprints — he just knew every inch of it — and as a new reporter, it was awesome to prowl the streets knowing the best editor on the planet had my back.”
Hechtman, who battled dementia for the past five years, had no living relatives but is survived by Masline and her daughter Cailtin as well as her daughter’s fiancé Eddie Wooden, Masline said.
In a 2007 letter to Masline, he asked her to inform The Post’s editors that they should not print an obituary for him when he dies.
“If they do, I’ll come back and haunt them,” he warned.
