Bill Gallo, who captured the spectacles and personalities of sports as a cartoonist at The Daily News for more than 50 years, expressing in warmhearted caricatures the deep affection New York fans felt for their heroes, died on Tuesday in White Plains. He was 88. 
 
 The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son Greg said. 
 
 Mr. Gallo was a gifted caricaturist who took a reporter’s approach to his subject, creating vivid one-take impressions of boxing matches, World Series games, Triple Crown races and, from time to time, political events. 
 
 Unlike many cartoonists, he resisted formulas. To recreate the 1971 title match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, he gave readers at least half a dozen key moments in the fight, all within a single cartoon panel. When Thurman Munson, the catcher for the Yankees, died in an airplane crash in 1979, he gave full rein to sentiment, showing two boys despondently leaving a sandlot as the head of Mr. Munson looked down from above. 
 
 His 15,000 cartoons for The Daily News included a gallery of popular stock characters, chief among them Basement Bertha, a washerwoman and die-hard Mets fan who appeared in his last cartoon, on April 19, window-shopping for a dress in case she was invited to the royal wedding in London. 
 
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 Other regular characters were Yuchie (YOO-chee), a sports-loving everykid, and General Von Steingrabber, a strutting martinet with a spiked Prussian helmet who closely resembled a certain owner of the Yankees. “Oof, I’m such a schmarty, I kiss mine own hand!” the exuberant general exclaimed in one cartoon. 
 
 William Victor Gallo was born on Dec. 28, 1922, in Manhattan and grew up in Astoria, Queens, where he rooted for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Homestead Grays, a Negro League team from Pennsylvania he saw when they played locally. 
 
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 His parents were immigrants from Spain. His father, an editor and reporter for La Prensa, a newspaper read by the Spanish colony in New York, died of pneumonia when Bill was 11, leaving the family in dire straits. 
 
 Immediately after graduating from high school in 1941, Mr. Gallo found work as a picture clerk at The Daily News, but less than a year later he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Trained as a demolitions technician, he saw combat with the Fourth Marine Division in the Marshall Islands, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima. 
 
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 After leaving the Marines he returned to The Daily News, where he worked as a caption writer, layout artist and reporter while taking night courses at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now the School of Visual Arts) and Columbia University. 
 
 As an artist, he started by producing small illustrations used to break up the text of sports columns. His first full-scale drawing, depicting a middleweight bout between the now-forgotten George Johnson and Moses Ward, appeared in April 1954. When his mentor, the legendary Leo O’Mealia, died in 1960, Mr. Gallo was named to replace him as sports cartoonist and more or less ordered to emulate O’Mealia’s tight draftsmanlike style. 
 
 Mr. Gallo, chafing at his instructions, soon announced that he was going to quit the cartoonist job. But his parting shot, a whimsical boxing cartoon with multiple outlandish images, convinced the managing editor that his looser, more humorous style could succeed. 
 
 “I’ve always tried to make it easy on the reader, whether I’m writing or drawing,” he wrote in “Drawing a Crowd: Bill Gallo’s Greatest Sports Moments” (2000), on which he collaborated with Phil Cornell. “Make it simple and natural on his eyes, so that he doesn’t have to strain and wonder, Who is this? What is that?” 
 
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 Mr. Gallo became a one-man franchise at the newspaper, which devoted its entire front and back pages on Wednesday to the news of his death. 
 
 He could be caustic, in a humorous or deadly serious vein. He drew an out-of-shape Muhammad Ali pushing his stomach before him in a wheelbarrow, an image the boxer displayed in his training camp when he prepared for the Larry Holmes fight in 1980. He took dead aim at racially exclusionary country clubs and the malign role of money and drugs in professional sports. 
 
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 He also expressed his thoughts in a Sunday column that touched on a variety of subjects — sports, primarily, but also topics as varied as his father’s death and the character of New York. 
 
 In 1998 he was given the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Cartoonists Society. He lived in Yonkers. 
 
 In addition to his son Greg, of Pleasantville, N.Y., he is survived by his wife, Dolores; another son, Bill, of Kennett Square, Pa.; a brother, Henry, of Bronxville; four granddaughters; and one great-granddaughter. 
 
 Mr. Gallo was often asked how long it took him to complete a cartoon. He liked to say, “Two hours and 45 years.” ||||| Bill Gallo, legendary Daily News cartoonist and columnist, dies at 88 after lengthy illness 
 
 Thomas Monaster for News Daily News legend Bill Gallo dies at the age of 88 late Tuesday night. 
 
 Bill Gallo for News CLICK HERE to see some of Bill Gallo's most memorable cartoons. Related News Lawrence: Gallo, Basement Bertha and Neeley 
 
 
 
 The prolific, playful hand that brought to life cartoon characters Basement Bertha, Yuchie and General Von Steingrabber has been stilled. 
 
 Bill Gallo, sports cartoonist at the Daily News for more than half a century and whose career at the paper spanned 70 years, died of complications from pneumonia at 88 in White Plains Hospital late Tuesday night. His passing marks the close of what seemed always to be an endless supply of ink and fun in the pages of The News. Inside our building, Gallo would walk around the big newsroom talking sports, bouncing ideas off coworkers or showing off his latest, comical work to everyone's delight. 
 
 "My father is a lasting legend to New York, and to New York sports," said Gallo's son Greg. "He will be forever thought of as a great cartoonist for the Daily News, but he will also be remembered as the gentleman he was to all the people he came across, everybody in the streets of the city. People loved him because he was a special human being." 
 
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 In recent months, while he fought off emphysema and a series of medical setbacks, Gallo continued to draw his cartoons and write columns from hospital beds and his home, surrounded by trays of colored pencils and erasers, dark pens and paint brushes sticking out of a Dixie cup. He would send his creations by overnight mail or ask a coworker to bring them to the office, checking in often by phone with editors. 
 
 "I'm just as enthusiastic about work today as I've ever been," Gallo said shortly before his death. "If I wasn't sick I'd be putting out some great stuff." 
 
 His last cartoon was just fine, appearing in the News on Tuesday, April 19. Appropriately enough, it featured the beloved Bertha, who was shown window shopping for a wardrobe while hoping expecting, even to receive an invitation to the royal wedding in London. 
 
 PHOTOS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BILL GALLO 
 
 "The passing of our great cartoonist, colleague and friend Bill Gallo marks the end of an era,'' said Daily News Chairman & Publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman. "From the time he arrived at the Daily News as a fresh-faced kid determined to make his mark in the city and the world, to the very end when he battled his final illness with grit, courage and grace - rarely skipping a cartoon or a column - Bill was a class act." 
 
 Gallo was an entrenched New York institution, yet somehow always remained vibrant and topical. 
 
 "He knew everybody and everybody knew Bill," said Bert Sugar, the boxing historian and writer who recently nominated his friend for a Medal of Honor at Ellis Island. Gallo was to receive that medal on May 7.
– The New York Daily News is mourning a man described as one of the greatest talents sports journalism has ever seen. Cartoonist and columnist Bill Gallo, who worked for the paper for the best part of 70 years, has died of pneumonia aged 88, reports the New York Times. Gallo, a Marine who fought in battles included Iwo Jima, drew more than 15,000 cartoons for the paper, winning praise for his vivid impressions of sports events of all kinds. Gallo—described by boxing historian Bert Sugar as "second-most outstanding symbol of New York, other than the Statue of Liberty"—kept producing cartoons and columns from hospital beds as his health declined over recent months. "I can't imagine the Daily News without Bill," sports editor Teri Thompson says. "It was an incredible honor to work with someone who so loved our business, and could take you back to JoeDiMaggio and Joe Louis in one moment and to Tiger Woods and Carmelo Anthony the next, all with a smile and a flick of the pen."