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Robin Jonaitis was driving down her street when she spotted her neighbor on the sidewalk, dressed as always in a jacket, holding a dog leash with no dog on the end of it.

The dog had slipped loose somewhere behind him, and Noel Young, lost in thought, had walked on without it. Robin doubled back along the route she guessed he would take, found the dog waiting at the roadside, loaded it into her car and brought it home. Her husband, Tony Jonaitis, still tells the story; a returned dog was a small thing, but it opened one of the friendships he would keep.

Young, a Scottish tabloid editor who lived in Marblehead for 25 years before returning home to Scotland, died June 27 at his home in Largs, on the Ayrshire coast. He was 86. He had edited Scotland's Sunday Mail at its peak, and in Marblehead he was a familiar sight on his own block — a dressed-up man walking his dog under a wide-brimmed Australian hat. Many neighbors knew the hat better than the man. A few came to know him well.

The Jonaitises lived within walking distance and became, in Tony's words, "just family, really." Much of what Marblehead knows of Young now runs through friends like them.

For those who knew him, the hat came first in memory. Young walked the block in a jacket and often a tie no matter the weather, a habit his companion, Carol Kent, could not break him of.

"He just was kind of a curmudgeon type looking person, and he looked Scottish," Kent said. "In the hottest weather he would wear a corduroy jacket."

Jonaitis remembered the same figure moving slowly past the houses.

"Very well dressed, suit and tie, no matter what the weather was like, with this Australian hat on, just puttering on the sidewalk with the dog," he said.

Understanding him took longer than recognizing him. The Jonaitises spent the better part of two years adjusting to Young's Scottish accent before they could follow him.

"My wife nor I understood the first year and a half to two years," Jonaitis said. "You get used to his cadence."

Kent, who had an ear for it, watched others struggle. Her late husband never managed. Even in Scotland, she said, Young himself sometimes lost the thread of a thicker local accent and turned to her, baffled.

To Matt Cryan, a neighbor in the Lincoln Park townhouses where Young lived off Lincoln Avenue, the writer was the absent-minded professor of the block, forever a step inside his own head.

"Walking around inside his head and not really paying attention," Cryan said, recalling how Young would leave a car running or a door open and think nothing of it. When Kent once mentioned the habit to his daughters, Cryan said, they laughed and told her he had always been that way.

A Fleet Street man in a corduroy jacket

Young was born in Dundee in 1939, trained at DC Thomson and made his way through the Glasgow papers and a stint on Fleet Street before Scotland lured him home, where he edited the Sunday Mail from 1988 to 1991 and built its circulation to nearly 900,000, a record for a Scottish weekend paper. Early on he helped subedit coverage of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

His son Gordon, who publishes the marketing magazine The Drum, where Young himself became U.S. editor after moving to Marblehead, wrote in a tribute that his father prized economy above all, cutting copy until every word earned its place.

"Get the story in the first paragraph," Gordon Young wrote, recalling a favorite refrain. "Don't mess about."

The story Young counted as his finest came out of Marblehead. After Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, was imprisoned for trying to blow up a transatlantic flight in December 2001, a British paper asked Young to land an interview. Rather than pull strings, his son wrote, Young simply mailed the prisoner a politely worded set of questions. A six-page handwritten reply came back.

If the Reid letter was his proudest scoop, Captain Kidd was his obsession. Young became convinced that the privateer, hanged in London in 1701, had been wrongly convicted of piracy, and he campaigned to clear the man's name and win him a statue in Dundee, the city where Young was born and where, he was sure, Kidd had been born too. He wrote a book about it, and by the accounts of those who knew him, he talked about little else.

"Every subject was Captain Kidd," Kent said. She traveled with him and took up the cause herself. Cryan took the opposite approach.

"I tried to avoid listening to that," Cryan said.

One conviction he defended even more fiercely was the Loch Ness monster. Jonaitis learned not to argue.

"He believed in the Loch Ness monster. He defended it nonstop," Jonaitis said. "I'm like, no, you're crazy, and he would get so offended."

On a boat on the loch, Kent recalled, Young got the answer he wanted: the guide told them, dead serious, that yes, the monster was real, and that he had seen it himself.

Gathering people was its own talent. Young started the group of newspaper, television and film people that became the Marblehead Media Group, which outlived his years in town. Jonaitis found his way in through his old work restoring 35 mm nitrate film at the Smithsonian.

The friendship the Jonaitises kept had a signal. They learned to watch the window for the hat.

"We can see his hat through the window," Jonaitis said. "Here he comes with a bottle of red wine."

He would stay for hours, and the talk went everywhere. Some nights it went to the movies; Jonaitis and Young once worked through the films of Federico Fellini in a single month. In his own written tribute, he offered a portrait his Marblehead friends would recognize.

"He enjoyed spirited conversation, a glass of red wine and a beautiful girl at his side," he said.

The road home to Ayrshire

Young loved the town, Kent said. He liked that he could walk to what he insisted on calling the shops, never the stores, and Jonaitis said he told friends its coastline reminded him of home. Every January he carried a piece of Scotland into town, enlisted at the Burns Suppers that Rhod Sharp and his wife, Vicki, ran at Old North Church to deliver the address to the haggis, which a video from Jan. 27, 2017, shows him performing haltingly but to great laughter.

His closest companionship in those years came from Kent. The two met through Young's second wife, Jan, a good friend of Kent's; after Jan died and Kent lost her own husband, they found each other in shared grief.

"I think Jan, in her way, kind of matched us up together before she died,” Kent said.

They were together roughly six years and made three trips to Scotland, where Young played tour guide to his own history, from the Isle of Skye to the grave of Flora MacDonald to the boat on Loch Ness. Jan's death, about a decade earlier, had left him heartbroken, Kent said, and neighbors looked out for him. She gave particular credit to Alessandra, the next-door neighbor whose family, she said, cared for Young as his health declined.

After a stroke, with his children's blessing, Young moved back to Scotland in 2024 and settled in Largs. He remarried there, to the surprise of the Jonaitises, who made the trip for the wedding along with another Marblehead friend, Laurie Fullerton.

Scotland kept pulling his Marblehead friends across the water. On one visit, one of Young's daughters handed the Jonaitises the keys to an old Volkswagen camper and told them to keep it as long as they liked. They drove the country for two weeks.

"It's beautiful beyond compare," Jonaitis said.

The last visit was harder. Not long before Young died, the Jonaitises flew to Scotland and found him in a hospital, in great pain and no longer able to speak. Jonaitis passed along good wishes from the friends back home.

"Everybody in the media group wants to know, wish you well, and his eyes lit up," Jonaitis said. "It was a brutal visit."

Young died June 27.

The dog is long accounted for, and the arguments over the monster in the loch have gone quiet. What his friends keep is the shape of a habit — a hat passing the window in the late afternoon, a jacket coming up the walk in any weather, a bottle of red coming through the door for a conversation that could turn to anything at all.

"His many Marblehead friends will be telling 'Noel stories' for years to come," Jonaitis said.

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