Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Pulitzer prize-winning chronicler of the underdog
NEW YORK — Jimmy Breslin scored one of his best-remembered interviews with President John F. Kennedy’s grave-digger and once drove straight into a riot where he was beaten to his underwear.
In a writing career that spanned six decades, the columnist and author became the brash embodiment of the street-smart New Yorker, chronicling wise guys and big-city power brokers but always coming back to the toils of ordinary working people.
Breslin, who died Sunday at 88, was a fixture for decades in New York journalism, notably with the New York Daily News, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for pieces that, among others, exposed police torture in Queens and took a sympathetic look at the life of an AIDS patient.
“His was the triumph of the local, and to get the local right, you have to get how people made a living, how they got paid, how they didn’t get paid, and to be able to bring it to life,” said Pete Hamill, another famed New York columnist who in the 1970s shared an office with Breslin at the Daily News.
“Jimmy really admired people whose favorite fourletter word was work,” said Hamill, speaking from New Orleans.
Breslin died at his Manhattan home of complications from pneumonia, according to his stepdaughter, Emily Eldridge.
It was the rumpled Breslin who mounted a quixotic political campaign for citywide office in the 1960s; who became the Son of Sam’s regular correspondent in the 1970s; who exposed the city’s worst corruption scandal in decades in the 1980s; who was pulled from a car and nearly stripped naked by Brooklyn rioters in the 1990s.
He was an acclaimed author, too. “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight” was his comic account of warring Brooklyn mobsters that was made into a 1971 movie. “Damon Runyon: A Life” was an account of another famous New York newsman, and “I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me” was a memoir.
In the 1980s, he won both the Pulitzer for commentary and the George Polk Award for metropolitan reporting. The Pulitzer committee noted that Breslin’s columns “consistently championed ordinary citizens.”
As reporters from around the world arrived to cover President Kennedy’s funeral, Breslin alone sought out the presidential grave-digger, Clifton Pollard, and began his report with Pollard having a breakfast of bacon and eggs at his apartment on the Sunday following JFK’s assassination.
“Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living,” Breslin wrote.
“‘Polly, could you please be here by eleven o’clock this morning?’ ” Kawalchik asked. ‘I guess you know what it’s for.’ Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
Breslin had two daughters and four sons with his first wife, Rosemary, who died of cancer in 1981. He later married Ronnie Eldridge, a former New York City councilwoman.
On Sunday, just hours after her husband’s death, she summed up their life together, saying: “We were married for 34 years and it was a great adventure.”