A sports happy kid from Dorchester, Frank O’Brien was 10 in 1951 when he stepped into the New England Sportsmen’s Show in the Back Bay and joined a long line of fans waiting to collect autographs.
Reaching the front, he found himself “face-to-face with Jim Thorpe,” the then-aging Olympic gold medalist. Mr. O’Brien was there for someone else, though.
“He signed my piece of paper and passed it to the right … to Ted Williams,” Mr. O’Brien recalled in a 1971 Boston Globe interview. “It was one of the most exciting moments of my life.”
Life would offer other encounters to rival that boyhood brush with sports immortality, including meeting Williams again as an adult, when Mr. O’Brien was on assignment during his 43-year career as an award-winning Globe photographer.
Mr. O’Brien, who kept a boyish face and enthusiasm for sports into his final years, was in hospice care for cancer when he died Thursday in his Canton home, on his 82nd birthday.
Many of his photos were as memorable as the moments he captured: Larry Bird puffing coach Red Auerbach’s cigar after the Celtics won the 1981 NBA championship; the US men’s hockey team “Miracle on Ice” victory in the 1980 Winter Olympics; Bobby Orr’s overtime goal that gave the Bruins the Stanley Cup in 1970.
Fans may have clipped and saved those photos, but Mr. O’Brien was also a master of capturing iconic figures in non-iconic moments, such as when he traveled in 1969 to spring training in Florida to photograph Williams, who had just taken over as manager of the Washington Senators.
“I must have taken over 100 pictures that day, just of Williams’s face, and I was pleased,” Mr. O’Brien recounted in an as-told-to piece written by the Globe’s Leigh Montville.
Though Williams could be intimidating — “he looked like John Wayne, talked like John Wayne, indeed bellowed like John Wayne” — on the baseball field “he was an easy subject,” Mr. O’Brien added. “He shouted, smiled, frowned, did all the things that help me make my money. I was happy.”
Starting out as a photographer nearly 60 years ago, Mr. O’Brien “came from the old school. He was birthed there, but he quickly expanded the technique,” said George Rizer, a retired Globe photographer who sought a job with the newspaper in no small part because he wanted to be like Mr. O’Brien, who became his friend.
“Frank had to make the basic shot for the news job, obviously — the play at the plate — but he was always looking for something else,” Rizer said.
“He set the standard for a lot of us here,” Rizer added. “He was the beginning of the ‘new gen’ of sports shooter, I call it. He dared to be different.”
Before cable TV and the Internet brought 24/7 sports and endless replays into everyone’s home and hands, the work of photographers such as Mr. O’Brien was as close as many fans got to Fenway Park, the old Boston Garden, or a mud-caked football player rising from a rain-soaked field.
Rubbing shoulders with sports stars for decades wasn’t something Mr. O’Brien wore on his sleeve, however.
“He was very unassuming about what he did for work,” said Maureen, his wife of 39 years. “People used to always want to talk with him — ‘Wow, that must be great.’ He loved what he did, he loved every minute of it, but until people asked him, he never spoke about it.”
Born on March 29, 1941, Mr. O’Brien grew up in the Neponset section of Dorchester, the son of Francis O’Brien, a mailer at the Boston Herald, and Mary Walsh O’Brien, who worked in the business office at Gillette.
The older of two siblings — his sister, Rosemary Coffey of Braintree, died in 2019 — Mr. O’Brien graduated from Cathedral High School and formed Neponset friendships to last a lifetime.
He attended St. Ann’s Church in the neighborhood, was part of St. Ann’s Band, and acted in New Neponset Players productions.
With several neighborhood friends, he also helped found the Line Club when they rented a place along Neponset Avenue and for 38 years operated a private club where friends could gather, have a drink, watch a game, and converse.
Previously, the originals would hang out at a nearby Howard Johnson’s restaurant until someone suggested they head to a bar across the street from a bowling alley.
“One of the guys would say, ‘You want to go up the line?’ ” recalled Dave Gilmartin of Brewster, a friend since their Neponset youth. The expression stuck when they named the club. “It was a way for us to keep everybody together,” Gilmartin said, “which we did.”
Mr. O’Brien “was very social,” said his daughter Dyanne, who lives in the Brookline part of Chestnut Hill.
“He always had a lot of friends,” she said. “He had friends that he was friends with in first grade. It’s nice to see that.”
Mr. O’Brien’s first marriage, to Joan McIntyre of Braintree, ended in divorce. They had four daughters.
He served in the Army National Guard and his father helped arrange a job interview with the Globe.
Mr. O’Brien initially worked in the advertising department, but wanted to be a photographer and grabbed the chance to shoot photos full-time when the Globe wanted more coverage of the Red Sox in 1967, the “Impossible Dream” year.
“He never had any schooling for it,” his wife said. “He picked it up as he went along.”
Even though he often was on the road with teams, “he was a good dad,” said Dyanne — so devoted that his daughters “didn’t appreciate what he was doing until others we knew appreciated him. Boys in our classes would say, ‘Oh, your dad had the best picture in the paper of so-and-so.’ ”
Her sister Beth, who lives in Neponset, would “open the sports pages to see if any of my dad’s pictures were in the paper, as if it was nothing. I never realized how big of a deal my dad was until I was older.”
He didn’t make a fuss about his legendary photos, either.
“My dad didn’t have one picture that he took up in his house. Not one,” Beth said. “They’re all in the basement, in a box.”
A funeral Mass was said Monday for Mr. O’Brien in St. Ann’s Church.
In addition to his wife and two daughters, he leaves two other daughters, Jody McEachern of Neponset and Kristin of Boston; 10 grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Mr. O’Brien and Maureen Higgins met at the Globe, where she is an executive assistant for the senior management team, and married after dating for a year.
They divided their time between Canton and Fort Myers, Fla., a warmer place for golfing in colder months.
“Family was always very important to him,” Maureen said, “and he was a perfectionist in what he did, all the time.”
As a working photographer, Mr. O’Brien was understandably awestruck when he shook the hand of his boyhood idol Ted Williams, but when he held a camera to his eye, work was primary — even when photographing Red Sox players after their heartbreaking seventh-game loss in the 1967 World Series.
“It was my job to make pictures,” he recalled in a Globe interview, 50 years later, “it wasn’t my job to be crushed.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.