May 13, 2013, Daily Brew, Legendary Toronto Sun co-founder Peter Worthington was a witness to history, by Steve Mertl,

May 13, 2013, Daily Brew, Legendary Toronto Sun co-founder Peter Worthington was a witness to history, by Steve Mertl, 

Peter Worthington seemed to me like a character out of The Front Page, the classic Broadway play (later a movie) about the cutthroat world of newspapering in the 1920s.

I know plenty of smart, courageous journalists but I don't think they make they quite like him anymore.

Worthington, who died Sunday at age 86 from an infection but had been ailing for some time, accomplished enough to fill a couple of normal lifetimes. He was a war veteran (Second World War and Korea), war correspondent (Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan), founding editor of the Toronto Sun and winner of multiple National Newspaper Awards.

"Peter Worthington was Old School," Sun columnist Mark Bonoskoski wrote Monday. "From the very first day I entered the Toronto Sun newspaper, way back in 1974, Peter Worthington was the template for my career, a career that has admittedly fallen drastically short of his."

[ Related: Peter Worthington, a co-founder of the Toronto Sun, has died at age 86 ]

Worthington was a witness to history. It's a cliched term when applied to journalists but in his case it was literally true.

Covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he was in the corridor of the Dallas police station as officers were escorting shooter Lee Harvey Oswald to a waiting van. Here's how Worthington's son-in-law, conservative commentator David Frum, described it Monday in a Daily Beast post:

"The wide-angle film of the scene in the basement of the Dallas police station on November 24, 1963, captures on the far left of the camera an unusually handsome man leaning against the station wall. Suddenly shots ring out: Jack Ruby has fired upon Lee Harvey Oswald. And the camera shows that man at far left abruptly snapping to attention and running toward the shots.

"That man was my father-in-law, Peter Worthington, and running toward the shots was his characteristic response to danger of every kind."

When the Toronto Telegram, where Worthington worked for more than 15 years, closed its doors, he didn't drift into another job. Instead, he co-founded the Toronto Sun, the brash tabloid that shook up Canada's staid newspaper world with its short, punchy stories and Page 3 Sunshine Girl photos. He served as its editor for a decade before stepping down to run twice unsuccessfully for Parliament, then returned as a columnist for the expanding Sun chain in 1989.

As a columnist, his outspoken right-wing views and unabashed anti-Communism turned off many more liberal-minded Canadians. Former Ottawa Sun publisher John Paton said in the Globe and Mail that Worthington's coverage of the numerous Cold War proxy conflicts in Africa and Asia between the West and the Communist bloc underpinned his political views.

"A Moscow correspondent who helped his translator defect ... His journalism career informed his world view and he came to his strong anti-Communism stance having been an eye witness to what was wrought in its name," Paton said.

But as the Globe pointed out in its obituary Monday, his final Sun column illustrated both his bluntness and compassion.

The piece, published May 5, called for Canada to give illegal immigrants amnesty "to enable them to become citizens." It might be unfair to would-be immigrants who've waited years to become Canadians, Worthington wrote, but it would be a practical solution to trying to find the hunt down some 40,000 who've dropped off the government's radar.

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As Frum noted, nothing was off limits to his journalism. When he needed a heart-bypass operation following a heart attack three decades ago, he wrote a series of columns about the experience.

"Yet time catches up with even the most indestructible men," Frum wrote.

Worthington went into hospital May 2 and doctors told him there was nothing left to do.

"Over the next week, he entertained his three children and six grandchildren with his famous gallows humor," wrote Frum. "A week later, he said his last goodbyes, commanded 'no tears,' and lost consciousness."

In his column, Bonokowski noted Worthington never received the Order of Canada, which has been bestowed on many prominent journalists, from CTV's Lloyd Robertson and Craig Oliver to CBC fixture Michael Enright and political columnist Chantal Hebert.

"Yet, to his dying day, he never got the call from Rideau Hall," he wrote. "This is unforgivable, and even more unforgivable now."

There will be plenty of tributes for Worthington in the coming days, said Frum.

"But Peter, never one to trust others to get the story, has scooped us all by writing his own obituary, which will appear in [Tuesday's] Toronto Sun."