CASCADE, Mont. – Many will remember Adam Clymer, who passed away Monday morning, as a dogged New York Times senior reporter or as a young reporter in 1972 covering his first presidential campaign in Timothy Crouse’s Boys on the Bus. Tributes will be paid to his journalistic accomplishments, which were many. But those of us who really knew him will remember him as a friend who, above all, embodied Winston Churchill’s advice to never, ever give up.

We became friends of a sort when he was covering politics not for the New York Times, but for the Baltimore Sun. But it wasn’t until some years later that he called me to say he had had a back operation and was anxious to get back on a stream for fly fishing, but wasn’t sure if it was safe to fish alone in his condition. He needed someone to accompany him, and he had found out that I too was addicted to fly fishing.