This year, 2020, keeps getting crappier. This morning we’ve learned that Wick Allison died, of cancer. From the obit by Tim Rogers, who runs Wick’s beloved D Magazine:

All of us, if we are fortunate, meet one or two angelic people in our entire lives whose serenity and calm circumspection not only inspire reverence but gently usher us toward a lifelong journey in search of our best selves. Wick Allison was not one of those people.

No, if there was a journey to be undertaken, Wick got it started with a kick in the ass and head-back cackle laugh that until recently echoed through the office of D Magazine. He was a mercurial genius. He was a bully. He was loud. He knew the answer before you did. He made things happen through a force of will that generated its own gravity and drew people to him. He could make you feel great about yourself or sick to your stomach, sometimes on the same day. He created things — publications, careers, political movements — with a fearless abandon that drove those in his orbit dizzy. Wick was something to behold.

Truer words have never been written about any man. It is hard to imagine the world without Wick in it. It is hard to imagine Dallas, or Texas, absent Wick. If you’re lucky, on the journey through life you meet two or three characters that remind you of what it means to live. Sometimes they’re saints. Sometimes they are bold sinners who really do try to be saints. Wick was the latter — that is a compliment from me — and if he is in heaven today, it might well be because the Lord looked at him and realized that it is impossible not to love the devilish Wick Allison, and that the party would be far less fun without him.

I first met Wick when I was living in New York City, writing for National Review, and had come down to Dallas with my wife to visit her family. We had lunch at Al Biernat’s, his magazine’s watering hole, and after it, I thought: so this is Texas. A bolder, brasher, more self-assured rascal I had never met. I loved him from the start. We got to be friends when I later moved to Dallas to write for The Dallas Morning News. 

I liked Wick from the beginning, but I grew to admire him for the tough stance he took in public against the Catholic diocese of Dallas, which was eaten up with scandal. Wick was a Catholic convert, and he loved the Church. But he could not stand its corruption; Dallas had become a national epicenter of coverup and abuse, and Wick would not have it. As a prominent local Catholic, Wick’s ardent and uncompromising voice for the children made a difference. The then Bishop, Charles Grahmann, tried to push him around. That was a mistake. It was always a mistake to try to push Wick around. Because he was so damn funny, it was not always easy to see how tough he was.

Wick was a Dallas rich guy, a public figure who believed in his responsibility to the public good. He worked incessantly on making Dallas a more humane place to live (he was a big fan of Jane Jacobs, who was the most un-Dallas person you can imagine). There was a private side of Wick that people didn’t see. Someone in a position to know told me once that nobody knows about the work he does with the poor in the Church. He doesn’t advertise it, because it would be un-Christian to do so. I can’t remember when I was told this, and maybe I shouldn’t bring it up, but I recall being so struck by it at the time. It seemed somehow off-brand — but, as I came to see, it really wasn’t. It surprises me not one bit that his family has asked for donations in his memory to the St. Vincent de Paul Society at Holy Trinity church, Wick’s parish.

If that had been the end of my story with Wick, I wouldn’t be writing this — and you wouldn’t be reading it, and maybe nothing else on The American Conservative site. Wick saved this magazine. I will let my colleagues who have a more intimate understanding of how he did it, but here’s how I was involved.

In the spring of 2011, I was working in Philadelphia at the Templeton Foundation, in a job that was winding down. I wanted badly to go back into journalism. Wick contacted me to share with me his plan to shore up The American Conservative, which had been in dire financial straits. Would I be interested in coming to work for it?

Absolutely! I would.

And that’s how it happened. Wick agreed to let me work remotely from Philadelphia for a while, and then when my sister in Louisiana died of cancer, he agreed to let me work remotely from the bayou, for good. It was unusual at the time, and he could have said, “We really need you in DC to do TV and other media shots to promote the magazine,” but he didn’t. He knew that my family needed me, and there wasn’t anything else to say about it. That’s how he was.

And so, I was able to build a life and career for myself at this magazine because of the generosity of this man, Wick Allison. There is an American Conservative today in large part because of the efforts of Wick Allison to shore it up. Anything I’ve been able to do in my book-writing career has been in part because Wick Allison gave me a chance at this magazine.

I write this with tears in my eyes — tears of gratitude, and tears at the thought of the neon light that has gone out in this world. God, he was one of a kind.

UPDATE: This is so, so good — excerpts of a Wick deposition in a libel case that Wick’s magazine won. This is who he was:

Q. Okay. What administration did you work in the White House in?

A. President Richard Nixon.

Q. What was your position in the Nixon administration?

A. Flunky.

Q. Flunky? Is that something like step and fetch it?

A. I prefer flunky.

Q. Okay. Who did you report to in the Nixon administration as flunky; i.e., who was the flunky supervisor?

A. Matthew Bald, who is now a retired federal judge.

Q. What years did you work in the Nixon administration?

A. 1970, ’71.

Q. Now, did the flunky job description include going through, oh, other campaigns’ files with flashlights or anything like that?

A. No.

Q. Okay. So you weren’t in any way supervised by Mr. Liddy or any of his folks, right?

A. No.

Q. Okay.

A. Is that meant as some sort of slight against the Nixon administration?

Q. No.

A. Is that a political statement in a deposition?

Q. Were you offended by it?

A. Yes. Thank you. I’m taking a break.

Read it all. It gets better, and funnier.