Columnist fought for the little guy
Jimmy Breslin, the legendary Pulitzer Prizewinning New York journalist, has died.
Jimmy Breslin, the street-savvy, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist whose twofisted prose championing the little guy and pillorying those who betrayed the public trust made him a New York City institution for more than 40 years, died Sunday. He was 88.
Breslin, who also turned out a string of fiction and nonfiction books, died of complications from pneumonia, the Associated Press reported, citing his stepdaughter, Emily Eldridge.
A self-described “unlettered bum” from the borough of Queens who nevertheless was known to read Dostoevsky for relaxation, Breslin launched his career as a columnist at the New York Herald Tribune in 1963.
From start to finish — at Newsday, where his last regular column ran on election day in 2004 — the stocky, loud and aggressive writer vividly captured what he considered “the only city in the world worth talking about.”
Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith once described Breslin’s writing style as being “like an Irish wind that has blown through Queens and Harlem and Mutchie’s bar. It is a pound of Hemingway and a pound of Joyce and 240 pounds of Breslin.”
Breslin was part of the wave of practitioners of what came to be
known as New Journalism: a group of gifted writers that included Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and others who reported on the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s in newspaper and magazine journalism that read like good fiction.
“I never thought about how to do a column,” Breslin told Marc Weingarten, author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight,” a 2006 book about the New Journalism revolution. “It just came naturally, I guess. It had a point of view and it had to spring right out of the news.”
There is, Breslin added, “an immediacy that makes the column fresh. Like you were covering the eighth race at Belmont. But no one was doing it when I started. That’s why everyone thought it was new.”
“Jimmy was incredible, the greatest newspaper columnist of my era,” Wolfe, who was hired as a general assignment reporter at the Herald Tribune in 1961, told Weingarten. “He turned out that column five times a week, and practically all of it was reporting. He introduced Queens to New York.”
That included introducing his readers to an array of Runyonesque characters — guys such as Fat Thomas, a 450-pound bookmaker; Jerry the Booster, a shoplifter; Bad Eddie, who “doesn’t do anything nice”; and Marvin the Torch.
“Marvin the Torch never could keep his hands off somebody else’s business, particularly if the business was losing money. Now this is accepted behavior in Marvin’s profession, which is arson,” Breslin wrote.
Occasionally, Breslin’s reporting extended far beyond the Big Apple. And as a reporter, he was famous for splitting from the journalistic pack.
Immediately after President Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, Breslin flew to Dallas, where he interviewed the Parkland Memorial Hospital surgeon who “took charge of the hopeless job of trying to keep the 35th president of the United States from death.”
He also interviewed the Catholic priest who administered the last rites, and the funeral director who picked out a bronze casket to bear the president’s body, to write his newspaper article, headlined “A Death in Emergency Room One.”
And in Washington, D.C., on the day Kennedy was buried, Breslin ignored the pomp of the funeral procession and instead wrote about the $3.01-an-hour equipment operator at Arlington National Cemetery who was assigned to dig Kennedy’s grave.
During the ’60s, the New York Herald Tribune’s star columnist — and regular contributor to the newspaper’s renowned Sunday magazine, New York — was on the scene of many other major events, including the Alabama voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
Sent to Vietnam the same year, he not only filed stories on the troops in the field but reported on what black soldiers thought about the Watts riots and hung out at a racetrack with a Special Forces sergeant and the Vietnamese prostitute who accompanied him.
But it’s as a columnist covering his hometown that Breslin earned his reputation, writing in his straightforward, oftentimes humorous, prose:
“The first funeral for Andrew Goodman was at night and it was a lot of work. To begin with they had to kill him.”
“Football is a game designed to keep coal miners off the streets.”
“The auditorium, named after a dead Queens politician, is windowless in honor of the secrecy in which he lived and, probably, the bank vaults he frequented.”
Breslin was a threetimes-a-week columnist for the New York Daily News in 1986, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for “columns which consistently championed ordinary citizens.”
Journalism’s most prestigious award came in the wake of a string of noteworthy Breslin columns, including those in which he revealed that some of the city’s cops were using “stun guns” to get confessions, that there was widespread bribery in the city’s parking bureau, and that subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz had shot two of his four black teenage victims, who he said were about to rob him, in the back.
In the process of turning out his columns, magazine articles and fiction and nonfiction books — including the 1969 bestselling comic novel “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” — Breslin became a wellknown celebrity.
He pitched Piels beer in a TV commercial (“a good drinkin’ beah”), guesthosted a segment of “Saturday Night Live” and hosted his own TV show: “Jimmy Breslin’s People,” a one-hour, twice-weekly program that lasted 13 weeks on ABC in 1986.
Breslin was born in Jamaica, Queens, on Oct. 17, 1928. His father, an alcoholic piano player, later abandoned the family. To support Breslin and his younger sister, Deirdre, their heavydrinking mother worked as a supervisor in the welfare department.
Breslin fared poorly in school, but he loved reading the sports pages and developed an early love of writing; at age 8, he turned out a hand-printed newsletter called the Flash, filled with schoolyard gossip.
In the mid-1940s, before he was 16, he began working as a copy boy at the Long Island Press. He later attended Long Island University at night and worked a variety of reporting jobs at the Press, including covering sports. Over the next decade and a half, he worked as a sportswriter for several papers, including the New York Journal-American.
In 1954, Breslin married Rosemary Dattolico, with whom he had six children. In his columns, he referred to his wife as “the former Rosemary Dattolico.”
Among his more than 20 books are the novels “World Without End, Amen” and “Table Money,” the biography “Damon Runyon: A Life,” and “I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me,” a memoir about his 1994 brain surgery.
Breslin’s wife of 26 years died of cancer in 1981. A year later, he married Ronnie Eldridge, an executive with New York’s Port Authority and a widow with three children, and moved from bluecollar Queens to Eldridge’s chic Central Park West apartment in Manhattan.
Breslin had six children from his first marriage: twins James and Kevin, Rosemary, Patrick, Kelly and Christopher; and three stepchildren, Daniel, Emily and Lucy. Rosemary died of a rare blood disease at age 47 in 2004. Kelly died at age 44 in 2009.