If you worked the press boxes in Chicago, you loved working with Joe Mooshil.

He could be gruff, and definitely didn’t suffer fools, and that includes coaches, players and owners. But if you earned the respect of the veteran Associated Press reporter in Chicago, it meant something.

From the obit in the Tribune:

On Saturday, friends and family remembered him as a gruff-voiced master of the sports world who nearly always had a cigar in his mouth, but whose tough exterior melted around those he loved.

From the Tribune’s Paul Sullivan:

“He was a classic, old-school sportswriter. It was hard to believe that anyone could write on deadline as sharply as he did. He made it look easy. He never got flustered.”

And from the Tribune’s Dave van Dyck:

“Joe Mooshil was kind of scary to us young guys because he had this gruff demeanor,” van Dyck said, chuckling. “Anything he said, he said it with this gruff and booming voice. But once you got to know him, he was just the opposite.”

Van Dyck also recalled Mr. Mooshil’s persistence as a reporter.

“I can remember many times coaches and managers getting really mad at him because he kept asking the same question over and over again until they really answered it,” van Dyck said. “He would never let them get off easy.”

A statement from Jerry Reinsdorf:

“The Chicago sports scene has lost a member of the Old Guard … with the passing of Joe Mooshil,” Chicago Bulls and White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said in a statement Saturday. “It’s probably fitting in a way that he passed away on a fall weekend filled with sports events, because Joe covered them all during his long and honor-filled career.”