It seemed as if Vince Garrity (1920-1972) was everywhere at wakes and weddings, baptisms and bar mitzvahs, parties, sporting events and political happenings. And if the truth be known, he was. The camera does not lie.

Pick up your morning paper, and there on page one would be Mayor Richard J. Daley talking to President Lyndon B. Johnson, with Garrity grinning between them. Cardinal John Cody with Garrity at his side. Harry Truman and Garrity. John F. Kennedy and Garrity. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Garrity. Joe Louis and Garrity. Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz chatting with a friend with Garrity in the middle with his arms around the two of them.

"Vince was the city's loudest gamecock," according to Dave Condon, the well-known Tribune sports columnist who was also Garrity's friend-but then, who wasnt?

Condon said he had checked out a story that Garrity was at the Last Supper, with his hand on Christ's shoulder, and found it to be untrue. Had Garrity lived 2,000 years ago, however, he certainly would have been there long enough to get into the subsequent painting.

Vincent DePaul Garrity, one of 12 children, was named in honor of Si Vincent DePaul, the patron of the church across the street from the home where he was born in 1920.

One of his boyhood chums was Tommy Goss, who grew up to be the petulant TV personality Tom Duggan. Garrity delivered newspapers as a youngster and played in the Charles H. Weber drum and bugle corps.

The job that most influenced his young life was that of batboy for the Chicago Cubs, starting in 1935, when the Cubs won the National League pennant. In 1938 he saw Gabby Hartnett hit the famous "homer in the gloamin' " against the Pirates to turn around the National League race, and he traveled with the team to New York for the road portion of the ill-fated World Series. That was the year Garrity was named Chicago's "All American Boy in Sports."

The contacts he made in baseball led to an early career in radio and television, broadcasting sporting events from golf to network TV wrestling and covering both Republican and Democrat political conventions. For nearly 20 years he had his own show on radio station WAAF.

The warmth of the spotlight beckoned Garrity into pontics, and he won election to the board of the Sanitary District of Greater Metropolitan Chicago, serving as its vice president

But it was as a photo-opportunity crasher that Garrity was the most creative. Whenever two famous people were being photographed, he had a knack for jumping between them just before the flashbulb popped, so the picture editors couldnt crop him out of the scene, though at least on one occasion a downtown newspaper airbrush artist was put to work painting Garrity out of a picture in which he didnt belong.

Garrity was never bashful, whatever the circumstances. He once clambered aboard a moving limousine to shake hands with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and on another occasion he buttonholed Truman at a political smoker and got the President to call Garrity's mother on the phone. Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court once inscribed a gavel for Garrity saying, Tor a little guy, you come on strong."

Garrity loved to see his picture in the papers so much that the press gleefully obliged on the occasions when he was arrested for drunken driving and wife beating.

If the audacious photo opportunist could buy the good will of the press, he was not above the attempt. He once buttonholed a Daily News reporter at a political meeting, stuffed $15 into the newsman's shirt pocket and told him, "Don't ever be ashamed to accept money."

Garrity, always the good fellow, died in 1972 while visiting a friend. He was 52.

Vincent D Garrity