Edwin Newman, a network news reporter whose wit and high professionalism made being a network news reporter seem a gallant, even alluring, calling, has died at the age of 91.

The New York Times obit describes him as being “genteely rumpled, genially grumpy,” a man of “constitutional waggishness.” He covered stories about cabbages and kings, and can lay claim to one of the greatest cabbage-level stories of all time. He’s the guy who, while moonlighting on an early cable TV program, broke the story of the South Seas island tribe that worshipped the boxing promoter Don King.

In addition to his career at NBC, Newman was also a defender of good English, a genial scourge of jargon, political blather and grammatical blunderings of all kinds.His first and best-knownbook on language -- which I still own -- was called "Strictly Speaking."

It was in his capacity as a grammarian that I met and shared a five-minute limo ride with Newman back in my scuffling days, in the spring of 1976. I was a cub reporter for The Niagara (Falls) Gazette. He was a one of the country’s best-known TV news reporters and he was on his way to talk about the glories of the English language to a convention of school bus drivers.

I have no recollection of how I wound up in the limo with him. But there we were, sitting across from each other, the cub and the lion. It was my first celebrity interview and I’d had all of 10 minutes to prepare for it, and I was utterly tongue-tied.

Seeing my discomfort, Newman took pity on me. We reversed roles.  He asked me to tell him a little about myself.

I gave him a nervous, vanilla answer, until I mentioned my wife was pregnant with our second child. I found myself, to my surprise, telling him about my doubts about the pregnancy.

Newman tilted his head, cocked an ample eyebrow at me, smiled and asked “You’re not thinking of  . . . doing anything about it, are you?”

By which I immediately understood him to mean, was I considering an abortion? I assured him I wasn’t.

He nodded and his smile deepened. I realized almost subliminally that he was simultaneously questioning my intentions and suggesting that, if those intentions included an abortion, then maybe I should give the question some thought.

Before either of us could take the interview any further, the limo had pulled curbside at the convention center. We scrambled out of the limo and shook hands. He was ushered backstage, I grabbed a seat in the peanut gallery, listened to his speech, took notes, walked back to the newsroom and wrote a story.

It was a clumsy eight-incher about how Edwin Newman, a nationally famous network news reporter, gave a speech to a convention hall full of school bus drivers about the importance of proper English.

But all the while I was writing the news story, the real story – the one about how a nationally known network news reporter had bothered to make a gentle but pointed query about whether a callow young stranger he’d just met was planning to make a disastrous mistake – that story couldn’t be told.

Until now.