Michael E. Yockel, Baltimore City Paper editor and music critic, dies

Michael E. Yockel, former Baltimore City Paper editor and music critic who later became a freelance writer and editor for numerous publications, died of complications following cancer surgery Monday at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Monkton resident was 71.

“Michael was a fiercely independent thinker and writer, with a warm kind heart and sharp wit,” wrote award-winning Baltimore filmmaker Richard Chisholm in an email. “With his passing, Baltimore has lost another piece of its intellectual soul.”

Jennifer Bishop, a former longtime City Paper photographer and a close friend, said: “He was an excellent journalist, a fine thinker and writer.

“He once laughed that he did not suffer fools gladly, and yet he was a gentleman with a great curiosity, dedicated to gathering information, listening, observing and understanding, and was pensive and measured in his responses, always respectful, earning a wide range of people’s trust and confidence.”

Michael Edward Yockel, the son of Thomas Yockel and Dolores Yockel, who both worked for the old Bell South Telephone Co., was born in Baltimore and raised in Arbutus.

Mr. Yockel was a graduate of Lansdowne High School in Baltimore County, where one of his close friends from childhood, and also a student at Lansdowne, was David Byrne, who went on to a musical career with the Talking Heads.

Mr. Yockel developed an interest in music early in life.

He was a fan of classical music, the Beatles, Todd Rundgren and Nirvana, his wife said.

At one time he managed Zen Archer, a progressive rock band, and his favorite band from Baltimore was Gerty.

After graduating from Lansdowne, he attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a year and then transferred to the University of Maryland, College Park.

“He was a rebel who didn’t like the journalism program at Maryland because he thought it was too rigid, and decided to major in English but was a few credits short of his degree when he left,” said his wife of 12 years, Betsy Boyd, an assistant professor and director of creative writing and publication arts at the University of Baltimore.

“He left to pursue a career in independent and alternative journalism,” Ms. Boyd said. “He worked for alternative weeklies because he was an alternative person.”

Mr. Yockel joined the Baltimore City Paper in 1979 as a music critic and was named editor in 1988.

“In his editorial roles at City Paper, he was discerning about writing standards, as well as the quality of advertisers with which the paper partnered,” Ms. Boyd wrote in an email. “He served as a mentor to many young writers. He preferred action-packed journalism and was never interested in hagiography.”

“When I was hired there in 1982, Michael was already there. It was a very small staff back then,” said Jim Burger, a photographer, who later worked in a similar capacity for The Baltimore Sun.

“We worked a lot of stories together. He was blessed with a magnificent mind, and could write about music, food, baseball, horse racing, horror movies — all with expertise and insight.”

After five years as editor, Mr. Yockel was abruptly fired in 1993.

“I was entirely shocked,” he told The Sun at the time. “I have no idea why I was dismissed.” Baltimore Sun Media Group purchased City Paper in 2014 and closed it in 2017.

From 1994 to 1996, he was associate editor of Miami New Times, and for the next three years, was an “editorial fixer” he explained in his resume, for a 10-paper alternative weekly chain.

Mr. Yockel began a freelance career in 1999 contributing to a number of alternative weeklies including New York Press, where he wrote an obituary column, Miami City Paper and was special projects editor for Baltimore Magazine.

As a student of obituaries and obituary writing, he was an enormous fan of Margalit Fox, the now retired legendary New York Times writer, his wife said.

He was managing editor for a year of Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred, and later became senior editor of Style Magazine, where his wife was editor.

“That’s why I fell in love with him, because he was such a good listener,” she said.

In recent years, he worked as a contributing writer to Baltimore Magazine, the Johns Hopkins University magazines, the old Urbanite and a book editor.

There probably was hardly a local publication or writer that didn’t benefit from his seasoned counsel and editorial expertise. “He served masterly as a copy editor for a recent book I wrote on documentary filmmaking for which I am eternally grateful,” Mr. Chisholm said.

One of his most recent projects was editing Edwin Warfield’s soon to be published “The Duchess of Windsor and Me — The Adventures of Wallis Warfield Simpson and the Warfield family.”

Mr. Warfield said Mr. Yockel took on the project last year to “move the book to another editorial level through scrupulous restructuring and polishing.”

But, perhaps his foremost non-editorial role in recent years was that of paterfamilias, when he became the father of twin sons, Miner Patrick Boyd, and Texas Lafayette Boyd, at 61.

Becoming a parent at that age, resulted in Mr. Yockel describing the experience in a first-person 2015 Baltimore Magazine article, at a time in life when “many men downsize their households, regularly check their 401k accounts, and yes, dote on their grandkids.”

He added: “Marriage and parenthood, it turns out, have been the most rewarding — and the best — decisions I’ve ever made.”

He was an avid traveler, liked classic movies and was an Orioles fan because he “loved the elegance and the way the game worked — the psychology of baseball,” his wife said.

He was also a power walker at Lake Montebello where he earned the nickname “The Flash.”

“He didn’t do things for optics. He wanted to live life and be kind,” Ms. Boyd said. “He was a very good man who cared about doing what was right. He was a humanist.”

Plans for a memorial gathering to be held in June are incomplete.

In addition to his wife and nine-year-old sons, he is survived by several cousins.