John McCandlish Phillips is 82 and lives in relative obscurity in New York City, where he is affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in the mid-1960s.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips can still be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park. Phillips has also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips also happens to be perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952.

Just how good was McCandlish Phillips, the byline he would eventually write under after first writing as John M. Phillips, although colleagues knew him as John in the newsroom, as a reporter and writer? According to Timesmen, he was without peer. Fellow New York Times writer and noted author Gay Talese described Phillips as the "Ted Williams of the young reporters" after the legendary baseball slugger. “He was a natural. There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.” His stories often focused on forgotten people and he was best known as a feature writer with a flair for style.

A lanky 6'6” tall, Phillips, known also as “Long John,” kept a Bible on his desk. Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor at the New York Times, described him as "the most original stylist I'd ever edited."

Abe Rosenthal, Times city editor in the early 1960s and later executive editor, said of Phillips: “He was an original. He had a very telling eye. He had a quiet merriment. His writing wasn't heavy.”

When an editor wanted to chronicle the last piece of cheesecake sold at Lindy's, the famed Times Square eatery in early 1969, Phillips got the nod. "What kind of a day is today?" wrote Phillips. "It's the kind of a day that if you wanted a slice of cheesecake at Lindy's, you couldn't get it.” He once described Wisconsin as the state that “bobs on a sea of curdled milk.”

A competitor, Pete Hamill, then a columnist for the New York Post, said of Phillips: “He used the senses. He looked. He listened. He smelled. He touched. There was a texture to his writing that was sensual.”

The New Yorker magazine described Phillips as "legendary," "brilliant," "much talented," and "more interested in the truth and texture of a story than in scoring a scoop.”

An anomaly in almost every way, unlike most reporters, Phillips was not a particularly great story idea generator. He was rather the go-to-guy or the literary gun-for-hire when an editor had a bright idea for an assignment and he wanted it executed with grace.

Perhaps Phillips' most memorable story was written in 1965, on Daniel Burros, the 28-year-old leader of the state Ku Klux Klan. Phillips wrote that Burros, who had been a ranking official of the American Nazi Party, was Jewish. Burros committed suicide, shooting himself the day the article was published.

In the 1950s and 1960s, newsrooms were loud and chaotic places, with phones incessantly ringing and typewriter keys clanging, that didn't resemble the quiet and orderly cubicle-divided insurance offices most do today. To say many of the characters that inhabited them as reporters and editors were rough around the edges, in their rumpled white shirts and flask of whiskey in the bottom desk drawer, would have been more simple observation than stereotype.

Phillips didn't drink, smoke or gamble. And just as he felt called by God to unexpectedly get off the train at Penn Station in New York City en route from Baltimore to Boston, as a master sergeant being discharged from the army at the end of his service in 1952, and apply for a job, still in uniform, at the New York Times, with his only journalism experience having been brief stints at Boston Sport-Light and the weekly Brookline Citizen in Massachusetts after graduating from high school in 1947 so, too, he felt called to leave daily newspaper journalism behind in 1973.

By that time, he had written his first book, The Bible, the Supernatural, and the Jews in 1970, published by Bethany House Publishers in Minneapolis. Unlike his newspaper writing, the prose is for the most part turgid and largely impenetrable, interspersed with huge blocs of Biblical quotations that destroy what little flow there is to the text. I can testify to this personally having taken about 16 months to plough through it. That's not to say the book's thesis – the Devil, or the “Enemy” as we Catholics like to say – was plotting in the late 1960s and early 1970s to get the younger generation interested in the supernatural and mysticism of eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, in order to lead them down the “path of spiritual ruination” is uninteresting.

Phillips denounced drugs, promiscuity, protest, long hair, short skirts, free love and the Sixties' counterculture in general in a way that seems particularly and perhaps unavoidably historically dated today – sort of like looking at pictures of protests on U.S. colleges campuses, as one might see them now, through the prism of an old sepia photograph.

In fairness to Phillips writing in 1970, the events were contemporaneous with the times and not historical artifacts as they are 40 years later in 2010.

Phillips didn't quite disappear completely from daily journalism. For the next eight years after leaving the New York Times in 1973, his byline appeared occasionally as a freelancer. In recent years, he has had three opinion pieces published in the Washington Post on topics ranging from media ethics to what he sees as the excessive complexity of the U.S. tax system. In 2005 he took on two columnists at his old journalism alma mater, the New York Times, namely Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, for heaping "fear and loathing" on evangelicals and traditional Catholics. "I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, … in a ghastly arcade mirror lately," he wrote.

The World Journalism Institute, founded in 1999 after discussions between Joel Belz, Marvin Olasky, Nick Eicher and Robert Case, and located on the campus of The King's College in New York City, has established a McCandlish Phillips Chair of Journalism. The institute published Phillips monograph, Faith in the Daily News Chase in 2001.

He has also written two other books, The Spirit World: A Christian newsman investigates the hidden powers of the supernatural, and his 1974 collection, City Notebook: A Reporter's Portrait of a Vanishing New York, which was published by Liveright.

But for the most, John McCandlish Phillips, by all accounts has not missed being a daily newspaper journalist during the second half of his life, even if he was the most gifted newspaper writer of his generation.