East Greenbush

Mike Jarboe, a classic curmudgeonly journalist whose rumpled exterior covered an expansive heart, keen intellect and passions that extended from fiddle music to horse racing, died Monday after a yearlong battle with cancer. He was 63 and recently had moved from hospice care to the home of his daughter Shennie Jarboe as his health declined.

Jarboe, who was raised in southern New Jersey, was proud of his blue-collar roots and background in factory work before, without a college education, he became a journalist. He arrived in the Capital Region when he was hired by the Times Union in 1990, coming from the Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee, where he was a copy editor. Before that, he edited for the Post-Standard in Syracuse.

More for you News A chat with Mike Jarboe, the fiddler and handicapper

During a 25-year career at the Times Union, he was a copy editor and rose to the position of copy-desk chief, where he was responsible for style and helming copy flow at night during deadlines.

"Mike was our most respected copy editor," said Times Union Editor Rex Smith. "He was the newsroom authority on matters of style and clarity, and the most creative headline writer I've ever known."

At work, Jarboe's slouched position at his messy desk did not present a welcoming profile to colleagues. He often muttered at copy, swore aloud at mistakes, sometimes whipping off his ever-present baseball cap and stalking away after an egregious error outraged him.

"I think some of his co-workers may have been put off by his personality throughout the years," said Senior Editor/Features Gary Hahn, who worked with Jarboe on the copy desk for 25 years. "But all his curmudgeon posturing was sort of a paper tiger, I think. He disliked confrontation, and was really a gentle soul underneath. He cared deeply about the printed word and journalism as a whole."

Former Times Union reporter Anne Miller, writing on Facebook, described Jarboe as a "cranky, old-school copy desk editor, the kind for whom there is no word too small to be worthy of consideration and debate." From Jarboe, Miller wrote, she learned "Chaff is the enemy. So is (B.S.). Words matter."

Times Union writer Amy Biancolli had a spirited debate with Jarboe four years ago about a local mayor's use of "gonna." Biancolli felt that, since he always said it that way, changing it to "going to" in a news story was inaccurate. Jarboe argued, "I think using 'gonna,' especially in news stories, adds nothing and can only serve to embarrass the speaker."

The newspaper depended on Jarboe's keen eye for errors in news copy, for spotting the devil in the details of grammar and syntax. He also found holes in reporting and storytelling, seeing both the forest and the trees. Jarboe further had a flair for headline writing, an art in the world of print journalism, where words have to fit a constrained space while still drawing the reader to a story.

Among his most memorable headlines were, for a story about a fundamentalist Christian who traveled on horseback to evangelize, "Sermon on another mount"; and, for a story about political candidates campaigning on social media, "Dudes, vote 4 me, will u? Tnx"; and, for a story about a hiker who amputated his own hand while stuck in a crevasse in Utah, ''A rock, a knife, a choice.''

Jarboe was also the sardonic humorist of the desk, keeping a journal of mistakes caught (or not) and famously bad leads to stories. He enjoyed being the chronicler of the paper and reveled in telling new hires particularly unseemly stories from years past. Some of them involved him. One Christmas night, Jarboe, as was his occasional habit, brought his pet ferret to work, draping the animal around his neck as he edited. The ferret drank too much of a spiked punch that had been brought in and defecated all over a fellow editor. Ever afterward, Jarboe would refer to it as "Savage Christmas."

A strong supporter of labor unions, Jarboe never wore a tie to work and referred to managers as "bosses." He liked to tell a story from his days working in a factory that made pet food, where a supervisor would stalk the production line shouting, "Hurry up, the dogs are hungry."

While invaluable in the production of a newspaper and in maintaining its standards and quality, copy editors are largely unknown to the public. Jarboe, anonymous for most of the year, had greater visibility for six weeks every summer, when he was a handicapper for the Times Union's coverage of the season at Saratoga Race Course.

"He loved the fact that people knew who he was, recognized him," said Tim Wilkin, who covers horse racing for the newspaper and competed with Jarboe for 15 seasons in a handicapping feature in the paper called Bankroll Beatdown.

"He kicked my ass in that every year," said Wilkin. "He was a horse player. He wouldn't be able to tell you who won the Travers last year, but he was very good at picking the horses that were running the next day."

A true Saratoga character at the track, the white-bearded Jarboe was delighted to hear that socialite Marylou Whitney had referred to him as Santa Claus and that thoroughbred trainer Eric Guillot coined a nickname for a post-weight-loss Jarboe: Good-Time Charlie Daniels After Jenny Craig. Jarboe was famed for his ability to pack away hot dogs in the race course's press box, and Wilkin remembers Jarboe once horrifying the press-box chef by putting eggs into his bowl of clam chowder.

Equal in his affections with journalism and the horses was playing the fiddle. A self-taught player who did not read music, Jarboe specialized in Appalachian tunes — he did not play bluegrass, he would inform you.

"He was very enthusiastic about his music," said Sue Mead of Charlton, who met Jarboe two decades ago at the Fiddler's Tour, a local traveling jam session, and played with him in a band called Dirt Road Molly.

"He had a large repertoire of fiddle tunes that he was always adding to, and he loved to introduce people to them," Mead said. Jarboe attended and performed in fiddle concerts and folk festivals locally, and he enjoyed traveling to fiddle festivals around the country, as, in earlier years, he'd followed the Grateful Dead.

It was at a 1994 music festival that Times Union columnist Fred LeBrun witnessed a moment that he considers quintessentially Jarboe. The two and other newspaper staffers were in a house the Times Union had rented to cover the Woodstock 25th-anniversary event in Saugerties. LeBrun was sitting on the porch late one night listening to the boom of commercial rock in the distance.

"Mike started sawing out an old-timey standard, something like 'Turkey in Straw,'" LeBrun said. "It seemed such a small sound, almost delicate, compared to the amped-up blare from the stage. But Mike was absorbed, unhurried. He put his fiddle down and without saying a word walked slowly back to the house. He'd made his statement."

Jarboe retired from the Times Union at the end of 2015 but continued when able to go to Saratoga during racing season. Wilkin estimated Jarboe was at the track about 50 percent of the time this year, including on the final day of the meet, when a race was named in his honor.

"I don't know how he did it. He was obviously in so much pain, but he got to the track," said Wilkin. "He just loved being there and said he always felt so much better once he got there." Jarboe was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in August 2016 and underwent a radical surgery called the Whipple procedure, which was judged a success. Last month, he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.

Jarboe is survived by his father, siblings, his longtime companion, Elizabeth Inman, and his children, Michael, Alisha, Shennen and Zachary, grandchildren and extended family.

Writing on Facebook, his daughter Shennie said there would not be an immediate funeral. She alluded to a future memorial event, saying, "We plan to celebrate his life in the ways he most enjoyed living it."