Legendary columnist relayed unique angles of news events
Jimmy Breslin, the New York City newspaper columnist and best-selling author who leveled the powerful and elevated the powerless for more than 50 years with brick-hard words and a jagged-glass wit, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88, and until very recently, was still pushing somebody’s buttons with two-finger jabs at his keyboard.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Ronnie Eldridge, a Democratic politician in Manhattan. Breslin had been recovering from pneumonia.
With prose that was savagely funny, deceptively s i mp l e a n d p o o r l y i mi - tated, Breslin created his own distinct rhythm in the hurly-burly music of newspapers. Here, for example, is how he described Clifton Pollard, the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s grave, in a celebrated column from 1963 that sent legions of journalists to find their “gravedigger”:
“Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.”
Poetic and profane, softhearted and unforgiving, Breslin inspired every emotion but indifference.
Love or loathe him, none could deny Breslin’s enduring impact on narrative nonfiction. He often explained that he merely applied a sports writer’s visual sensibility to the news columns. Avoid the scrum of journalists gathered around the winner, he would advise, and go directly to the loser’s locker. This is how you find your gravedigger.
“So you go to a big thing like this presidential assassination,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “Well, you’re looking for the dressing room, that’s all. And I did. I went there automatic.”
Breslin wrote about Kennedy’s gravedigger, the sentencing of the union gangster Anthony Provenzano, the assassination of Malcolm X, and a stable of New York characters real and loosely based on reality, including Mafia boss Un Occhio, arsonist Marvin the Torch, bookie Fat Thomas and Klein the lawyer. But Breslin’s greatest character was himself: the outer-borough boulevardier of bilious persuasion.
“Jimmy invented himself,” said Donald H. Forst, a prominent New York newspaper editor who died in 2014. “He was irascible, extremely talented and very, very hardworking. And he understood what news was.”
In addition to his wife, Eldridge, Breslin is survived by h i s f our s o n s , Kev i n , James, Patrick and Christopher; a stepson, Daniel Eldridge; two stepdaughters, Emily and Lucy Eldridge; a sister, Deirdre Breslin; and 12 grandchildren.