They are still mourning Paul Newman — on Friday Broadway dimmed its lights in his honor –– and it reminded me of something that surprised me about him.

I knew he wasn’t young, but 83? That’s my dad’s age — to use a 1960s phrase, it’s the establishment’s age. These were folks who drove Oldsmobiles and used Brylcream. We may have loved many of them, but they were hardly our icons.

Yet Paul Newman was exactly that.

He was cool — like Gable and Bogart before him, and Clooney today.

It took Newman’s loss to get me thinking how a guy that age was a role model to a teenager like me in the 1960s.

He wouldn’t be the first I’d bring up if you asked my cultural idols from that era. I’d more likely talk about the Beatles, or even names like Abbie Hoffman. I wasn’t some radical, but it was the age of rock and protest. It wouldn’t occur to me to put Paul Newman on my list.

Yet his passing reminds me that back then, we semi-counterculture types had another focus that’s sometimes overlooked. It wasn’t just about bellbottoms and Woodstock. Those things had to do with being hip. Hip is a trend and trends fade.

Paul Newman was about cool — the American big-screen version of it. Cool is not a trend. Cool is timeless. And beneath the long hair, I wanted to be that kind of cool

Back then, it was personified by the likes of Sean Connery, Robert Redford and Newman himself. You could drop any of those three in their prime into leading-men roles today and they’d be stars — just as Clooney would be a star in 1960s Hollywood. Their style is ageless.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came out in 1969, pretty much the height of that era’s feminist wave. But in the first scene, Redford surprises Katherine Ross at night at her home and at gunpoint, makes her unbutton her dress. As he ominously puts a hand inside it, she says, “What took you so long?” Audiences loved it, because sexual politics aside, Redford had “it” and everyone surrenders to cool.

In the same movie, Newman reflected his own version of it, with a twist. I loved Sean Connery as Bond, but that was about fantasy. Newman was more real. He didn’t foil every foe. He didn’t arrogantly smirk at peril. He was vulnerable enough to be afraid of it. But even in dread, he kept his wits and humor.

When a huge goon challenges him to a knife-fight over who would run the Hole-in the-Wall gang, Newman whispers to his pal Redford to bet on the goon. Then he asks what the rules are. The goon, towering over him, says, “Rules? In a knife fight? No rules.” At which point Newman kicks him between the legs, knocks him out and triumphs. It’s not how Superman would have done it, but Superman’s on a pedestal. Newman you could relate to.

Later in Butch Cassidy, he and Redford are cornered on the edge of a sheer cliff over a river, their trackers closing in. Newman says they have to jump. Redford says he can’t swim. At which point, Newman laughs and says, “You crazy? The fall will probably kill you.” What happened next is why most males saw themselves in both actors. They didn’t jump fearlessly. They jumped terrified. But they jumped. And they made it.

In Cool Hand Luke, Newman had an even more reserved cool. At one point, he starts to get massacred in a boxing match against the prison-yard bully George Kennedy. It’s hopeless. But then, bloodied, half dead, with nothing left, he keeps getting up. Kennedy at last loses his stomach for slaughter and walks away, surrendering. Newman later delivers his line to live by: “Sometimes nothing can be a pretty cool hand.”

And of course there was The Sting — where Newman played a master con artist, but you could relate because again, he didn’t take risks fearlessly, he did so in spite of being afraid.

“He’s not as tough as he thinks,” Redford says at one point of their nemesis.

“Neither are we,” says Newman.

In the end, we’re all insecure, but Newman taught that you could still have class and poise. It extended to his real life. Though a star to the end, he once said this about his later career: “The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is out-grossing my films.”

And unlike those big-screen celebs who confuse good genes with talent, Newman also said, “I picture my epitaph: ‘Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.’ ”

In fact, he died a success because his style was timeless.

I’m still taken up short that a youth role model of mine was 83.

It’s a heartening reminder.

It isn’t about how old you are.

mpatinkin@projo.com