The Times Of His Life: ARTHUR SULZERGER JR.

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Someone who grows up with his own gas pump and dog cemetery, and is heir to the greatest newspaper dynasty in the country, has to work hard at being a regular guy. For Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who succeeded his father as publisher of the New York Times this year, this means taking public transportation, not owning a country house or a car, and touring Europe by secondhand BSA 175 motorcycle. His signature sport is not golf or squash but rock climbing. The new Star Trek is his favorite program. He has taken on cleaning up Times Square and working at homeless shelters rather than organizing charity balls. If the restaurant choice is up to him, it is usually inexpensive and convenient to a subway stop.

But despite the camouflage, if he were taken prisoner by the Daily News, his cover would be blown when he couldn't recite the rules of stickball. His wardrobe is suspicious as well. With his double-breasted jackets, pink suspenders and purple-striped shirts, he dresses as if Paul Stuart grabbed him by the French cuffs when he was young and has not let go. The burden he has decided to take on in life -- to be like everyone else when he so obviously isn't -- requires immense energy and makes him seem hyperactive at times. That he engages so earnestly in the effort is one of the more endearing things about him.

As Sulzberger returns by subway from jury duty, talking about it as a great adventure rather than an onerous task, he bounds into the company cafeteria for a late-afternoon yogurt and a chance to wave to a few troops. If there is a hand among the 300 in the newsroom he hasn't shaken, it is not for lack of trying. "I'm a journalist who gets off at the wrong floor now," he is fond of saying.

Unlike his father, who reportedly witnessed a fiery car crash at Le Mans and neglected to call the news desk, he knows his way around a notebook. While an undergraduate at Tufts, he worked at the Boston Globe and the Vineyard Gazette. After graduating, he worked at the Raleigh Times in North Carolina and the Associated Press in London before joining the New York Times as a reporter in the Washington bureau in 1978.

David Binder, his editor there, remembers him as "an invading army. He worked harder than anyone and had fun at it besides." No other cub reporter would have played along so willingly when Binder, trying to prevent Sulzberger from going home on time and spoiling a surprise birthday party, asked him to get quote after quote about the Panama Canal treaty. "I said, 'Arthur, why don't you call Ellsworth Bunker and see what he has to say?' Arthur got a quote from Bunker a few minutes later. Then I said, 'What about Averell Harriman?' He got a quote from him. Then another elder statesmen, and another. Finally I let the guy go."