When several dozen family and friends gathered last month for a memorial service in New York to celebrate the life of Marshall Weinberg — a New York stockbroker and philanthropist who shared a mentor and seven-decade friendship with Warren Buffett — I knew exactly what story to tell.

It was the spring of 2010, at one of my first board meetings as the relatively new editor in chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, there to give an update on our editorial strategy.

“Now wait a minute,” Marshall interrupted with a wave of the hand. In his trademark booming voice, he asked: “Am I the only one here who doesn’t know what a blog is?”

Yes, this white-haired almost octogenarian was the only one in the room who didn’t know a blog from a bagel. What was this guy doing on our board?

Later in the meeting I got my answer.

Like many organizations in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, JTA’s outlook was bleak. But we were on the verge of bouncing back, as we closed in on a sizable grant from a foundation that had never supported us. Unfortunately that opportunity suddenly collapsed when the foundation’s chairman offered us an additional smaller grant to do an ideologically driven hit job on a specific organization — and we declined.

One JTA board member expressed dismay that the staff had made this costly decision without seeking board guidance. Several more veteran board members pushed back, arguing that editorial independence required the staff to make these types of journalistic calls.

The argument went on for several very tense minutes – until Marshall suddenly raised his hand and slammed it on the table.

“We wouldn’t do it for a million dollars!”

Conversation closed.

Marshall, who died at 95 in his Upper East Side apartment on Sept. 20, was clueless about blogs, and for that matter smartphones and social media. What he did know — channeling his namesake, the crusading civil rights lawyer Louis Marshall — was right from wrong, the causes he cared about and how to step up when it mattered most.

Marshall served on the board of JTA and its eventual parent organization, 70 Faces Media, for about 45 years, including as president in the early 1990s. Flash forward two decades after his presidency — well into the early 2010s — he was still JTA’s largest individual donor, a distinction he would complain about, lamenting the failure of his fellow board members to do more. When I excitedly told him in 2014 that several of them had finally surpassed him in order to support the merger that created 70 Faces Media, he immediately raised his gift to match the new benchmark.

Marshall was an only-in-New York character, a man of immense wealth who spent freely on culture, travel and, most of all, his philanthropic causes — while living for 65 years in the same one-bedroom rent-controlled apartment that definitely looked its age. He loved food and could afford to eat anywhere but was usually........

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