His name was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, but you wouldn’t have known it from the speakers who paid tribute to him on Friday for his forceful, yet genial, guidance of The New York Times through more than three decades of turbulence and growth.

From start to finish he was Punch, just Punch. It is how everyone knew him during his years as chairman and chief executive of The New York Times Company and publisher of its flagship newspaper.

That boyhood nickname traveled with him throughout a life that ended last Saturday when he died at 86 after years of illness. And it was how he was referred to by relatives and former colleagues at a remembrance that was true to a man who prized orderliness and who, by all accounts, had scant interest in having people go on and on about him....