LUPICA, BRAMHALL HONOR VOICE OF NEW YORK
Pete spoke the truth, and wrote with passion in a lifelong quest for justice
Pete Hamill, a child of Brooklyn who became a giant of newspapers and books and his city most of all, died Wednesday morning. We had celebrated his 85th birthday with him, by Zoom, at the end of June. He had ruined kidneys at the end and ruined hips and had been on a walker and on dialysis for years but, in the late innings especially, showed as much heart as any prizefighter he ever celebrated.
He was still working on another book, about going back to Brooklyn to live out his splendid life. It was to be called “The Old Country.”
But to the end, his country wasn’t just the borough of Brooklyn. It was the country of New York City, for which he was the poet laureate.
He started at the old New York Post, Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post, in 1960. He had written a letter to columnist James Wechsler, and before long the great Paul Sann, who edited the Post in those days, hired him. He began writing columns for the Post in the ’60s and Jimmy Breslin was doing the same for the old Herald Tribune, and after that, the business of column writing, in New York and everywhere else, would never look the same or read the same or be the same.
He once told me that a writer’s voice was like a boxer’s right hand. You either had one or you did not.
“It can’t be taught,” Pete said, “and certainly can’t be manufactured.”
He was a friend to Robert F. Kennedy, and one of those who convinced Kennedy to run for president in 1968. So he was a friend to him, and boxing champs like Jose Torres, and Frank Sinatra.
He was was 12 years old when he first saw Jackie Robinson play baseball at Ebbets Field in the summer of 1947, when Robinson changed baseball and changed the country.
“He didn’t just integrate baseball,” Pete said and wrote of Robinson many times. “He integrated the stands.”
Later he came to love the Mets, because they were National League New York the way he was. The night they won the pennant in 1969, on their way to winning the World Series that year, he wrote “We needed a poet at Shea Stadium last night…..”
They had one. It was Pete Hamill.
Pete wrote about Robert Kennedy the night he died at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan in ’68. He was right there the way Breslin was right there at the Ambassador Hotel. He wrote magnificently about his city and the country and the world and his parents and his brothers and sisters. He wrote about Vietnam.
In the history of newspapers, there was never anyone whose use of the language was more elegant than his was. That voice could be full of anger, of course. He went at injustice, always, with a shout and even fury.
But at its heart, because of his own great heart, it always came back to something William Peter Hamill, son of Billy and Anne Devlin Hamill, called “an old-fashioned thing called grace.”
The day the planes hit our buildings in 2001, he was in downtown Manhattan for a meeting about the Tweed Museum, and after he survived the sheer terror of be
ing separated from his wife, the writer Fukiko Aoki, after they managed to find each other in the chaos of those downtown streets that day, he did what he had always done: He went to work. He wrote.
It was Pete Hamill who said that the true greatness of his city showed itself to the world on Sept. 12 that year, and Sept. 13, and the days that followed.
“It was,” he said, “like watching us all get to one knee, and finally straighten all the way up.”
Pete, who had been a writing hero since I read his collection “Irrational Ravings” in college, started at the Daily News on the same day I did, Jan. 2, 1977. And then Breslin and Hamill were right down the hall from the sports department, on the seventh floor of the old News building on 42nd St., up the elevators after you walked past the giant globe they used in the “Superman” movies.
Pete’s tiny office was on one side and Jimmy’s was on the other, and one was smoking cigarettes and the other cigars and it wasn’t smoke you saw and felt and smelled between them. It was magic.
“We’re supposed to live a life,” he said, “not an apology.”
What a life it was. He later became the editor of both the Post and the Daily News. He never stopped writing his truly fine novels, “The Gift” and “North River” and “Loving Women” and “Snow in August” and “Tabloid City,” and that is the short list.
The monument of them all, the best thing he ever wrote and, believe me, that is saying plenty, was “A Drinking Life.” It was about so much more than his drinking days. It was about Brooklyn and family and newspapers and the City of New York most of all.
We had a night for Pete in December of 2018 at NYU, a celebration of who he was and what he had meant to all of us who spoke that night. I told a story about being with Pete at Vero Beach, Fla., one spring, and him meeting Roy Campanella, one of his beloved old Dodgers.
Campanella that day said to Pete, “You’re from Brooklyn, right?” Pete asked how he knew.
“Guys your age,” Campy said, “you’re always from Brooklyn.”
Jim Dwyer, the great New York Times columnist, probably had the best valediction that night of what Pete had always been, and meant, as a columnist.
“He always told the truth,” Jim said, “cleared the air, gave us hope.”
He was gifted, and kind, and generous, and loyal. I spoke to him for the last time last week, and told him I loved him because I did, for more than 40 years; because I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without him in it.
It was the last time I heard that voice, full of New York, imagining the words on a page as he spoke, remembering what I’d felt, what everyone felt, the first time we read Pete Hamill.