David Poole Anderson was born on May 6, 1929 in Troy, New York, across the Hudson River from the State capital of Albany. His father was the advertising director of The Troy Times, and his grandfather was its publisher. So, as the saying goes, he had "printer's ink in his blood."
But his father moved the family to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and got an advertising sales job with The New York Sun. Dave graduated from Xavier High School in 1947, by which point he was a messenger for The Sun. Like basketball star George Kaftan, who graduated from Xavier 2 years earlier, he went to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduating in 1951.
By that point, The Sun had merged with The New York World-Telegram. In 1953, Dave became the Brooklyn Dodgers' beat reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle. In early 1955 -- timing is everything -- the paper whose giant 1941 headline introduced the phrase "WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR" to the Brooklyn lexicon went out of business, just 9 months before the Dodgers finally won the World Series. (Today, only one daily paper specifically covers one Borough alone: The Staten Island Advance.) Dave was still able to cover the '55 Dodgers, as he'd been hired by the New York Journal-American. It was while covering the Dodgers for them that he turned out the lights in the Ebbets Field press box.
In 1966, the Journal-American, the aforementioned World-Telegram & Sun, and the New York Herald Tribune all went out of business, following the New York Mirror in 1963. All of these papers were pretty much done in by the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63. As with many other New York newspaper writers, including sportswriters, Dave Anderson was hired by one of the surviving big three: The Daily News, the New York Post, or, in his case, The New York Times.
The Times gave him a regular column in 1971. The writers' associations for pro football and boxing gave him their achievement awards, the Dick McCann Memorial Award and the Nat Fleischer Award, respectively. In 1981, he became only the 2nd sportswriter to win the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, after fellow Times writer Red Smith. In 1990, he was elected to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, joining fellow Times writers Smith, Arthur Daley and John Kieran.
He retired in 2007, but still contributed an occasional column, the last being on the U.S. Open in August 2017.
He lived in Tenafly, Bergen County, New Jersey with his wife Maureen, with whom he had 3 children. After her death in 2014, he moved into an assisted living facility in nearby Cresskill. He died there yesterday, October 4, 2018, apparently of a heart attack, at age 89.
His lights have now been turned out, but his light still shines brightly.