I invited Tim Russert into my family room every Sunday as he hosted Meet The Press.

I didn’t know Tim personally, nor did I ever meet him.

But I did feel as though I knew him.

He was that kind of guy who delivered home-spun explanations of what was going on in the news and politics.

You felt after inviting him into your home year after year you could trust his delivery of the news in the way in which he conducted his interviewes.

He was well prepared, asked insightful, hard, but fair, questions and then allowed the interviewees the time to respond.

He was never rude to a guest nor did he ever play the gotcha game and then cut the guest off with “we only have 30 seconds left” for the answer.

We also knew him through his books which brought the human side.  He wrote “Big Russ And Me in 2004, a book about his father who is now 83 and his love for his dad, who was a part of the greatest generation, and how he grew up from humble beginnings in Buffalo. He wrote another book “Wisdom Of Our Fathers” in 2006.

He revealed his human side in these books his love of family, his wife Maureen Orth, a writer for Vanity Fair and their son Luke, who just graduated from Boston College this year and who Tim went on a celebration vacation to Italy, only returning yesterday.

We knew him also because of his unbending faith to the Catholic Church and how delighted he was to have meetings with the last two Popes on a few occasions, his love for the Buffalo Bills, the New York Yankees and most recently the new Washington franchise, the Nationals.

He allowed us to know him because he revealed his human side and that made the personality all the more human and believable and credible in his job as a journalist.

Tim was a genuine person and all of those that knew him personally paid tribute to him today, because he died at work doing what he loved, of a heart attack at the age of 58.

The point of this tribute is unlike all of his peers, his journalistic colleagues, the politicians and news makers he interviewed, all of which were his friends who were saddened by the sudden loss  — Tim Russert touched people, he himself, never imagined the Americans across this nation who allowed him to come into their home since he began hosting Meet The Press in 1991.

After all like many Americans, I didn’t personally know Tim Russert, but I did know him as a person in love with his family, his God and his Country and one who knew how to deliver the news, and I will miss not having him in my home this Sunday and many Sunday’s thereafter.