Rayner Pike, beloved Associated Press journalist known for his wit and way with words, dies at 90

Rayner Pike, a retired reporter for The Associated Press who contributed his encyclopedic knowledge of news and crafty writing skills to some of New York City's biggest stories for over four decades, has died. He was 90.

Surrounded by family at the end, his Dec. 26 death at home in Arlington, Massachusetts, set off a wave of tributes from former co-workers.

For a 1986 story challenging city-provided crowd estimates, he paced out a parade route on foot — “literally shoe-leather journalism,” New York City bureau colleague Kiley Armstrong recalled.

The memorable lead that followed: “Only a grinch cavils when, in a burst of hometown boosterism, the mayor of New York says with a straight face that 3.5 million people turned out for the Yankees’ ticker-tape parade.”

Pike worked at the AP for 44 years, from 1954 to 1998, mostly in New York City — yet he was famously reluctant to take a byline, colleagues said. He also taught journalism at Rutgers University for years.

“He was smart and wry,” former colleague Beth Harpaz said. “He seemed crusty on the outside but was really quite sweet, a super-fast and trustworthy writer who just had the whole 20th century history of New York City in his head (or so it seemed — we didn’t have Google in those days — we just asked Ray).”

Pike was on duty in the New York City bureau when word came that notorious mobster John Gotti had been acquitted for a second time. It was then, colleagues said, that he coined the nickname “Teflon Don.”

“He chuckled and it just tumbled out of his mouth, ‘He’s the Teflon Don!’” Harpaz said.

Pat Milton, a senior producer at CBS News, said Pike was unflappable whenever a chaotic news story broke and he was the person that reporters in the field hoped would answer the phone when they needed to deliver notes.

“He was a real intellectual,” Milton said. “He knew what he was doing. He got it right. He was very meticulous. He was excellent, but he wasn’t a rah, rah-type person. He wasn’t somebody who promoted himself.”

Pike's wife of 59 years, Nancy, recalled that he wrote “perfect notes to people” and could bring to life a greeting card with his command of the language.

Daughter Leah Pike recounted a $1 bet he made — and won — with then-Gov. Mario Cuomo over the grammatical difference between a simile and metaphor.

“The chance to be playful with a governor may be as rare as hens' teeth (simile) in some parts, but not so in New York, where the governor is a brick (metaphor)," Pike wrote to Cuomo afterward.

Rick Hampson, another former AP colleague in the New York bureau, said he found it interesting that Pike's father was a firefighter because Pike “always seemed like a journalistic firefighter in the New York bureau — ready for the alarm.”

He added in a Facebook thread: “While some artistes among us might sometimes have regretted the intrusions of the breaking news that paid our salaries, Ray had an enormous capacity not only to write quickly but to think quickly under enormous pressure on such occasions. And, as others have said, just the salt of the earth.”