(A pox on you, gonZo! I had this written at work, where I obviously couldn't get to this Forum to post it.... (grin) )
(I'll remove the one I posted. Actual writing beats cut-and-paste, especially in a Breslin obit. –gonZo)JIMMY BRESLIN (1928-2017):James Earle Breslin was born in Richmond Hills, Queens, on Oct. 17, 1928 to James Breslin Sr. and his wife Frances. His alcoholic father abandoned the family when he was 6.
A college dropout, Breslin got his first newspaper job as a copy boy at the Long Island Press in 1948, and then became a sportswriter at the Journal-American.
In 1963, he was working for the Herald Tribune when he was sent to cover JFK's funeral. Instead of being one of the multitude reporting on the actual funeral, Breslin found someone unusual to interview:
"Pollard was in the middle of eating [breakfast] 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. '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 was the archetypical beat reporter. Cigar smoking, whiskey **94**, pounding typewriters so hard he'd occasionally break them. He moved on to the NY Daily News, where by the 1970's his reporting had made him sufficiently well-known in NYC to get him an unusual fan:
The letter was from the person who calls himself "Son of Sam." He prowls the night streets of New York neighborhoods and shoots at young girls and sometimes their boy friends too, and he has killed five and wounded four. He sneaks up on victims with a .44-caliber pistol. Most of the young women had shoulder-length brown hair.
One of the victims was Donna Lauria, who was 18 last year when the killer shot her as she sat in a car with her girl friend outside the Laurias’ apartment house on Buhre Ave. in the Bronx. Donna Lauria was the only victim mentioned by the killer in this letter, which was sent to me at my newspaper in New York, The Daily News. So yesterday, I took the letter up to the fourth-floor apartment of Donna Lauria’s parents and I sat over coffee and read the letter again and talked to the Laurias about it....
J.B., I’m just dropping you a line to let you know that I appreciate your interest in those recent and horrendous .44 killings. I also want to tell you that I read your column daily and find it quite informative.
In December 1980, he banged away at his typewriter to beat the deadline for a piece on a killing outside an apartment building on Central Park West:
That summer in Breezy Point, when he was 18 and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life.
Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.
And now, last night, a 34-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at 82nd St. and Columbus Ave. and the call came over the radio: “Man shot, 1 West 72 St.."
He cultivated connections with various shady but colorful characters in New York City. Klein the Lawyer, Marvin the Torch, Shelly the Bail Bondsman, Un Occhio the mob boss.... These contacts helped him break a multi-million dollar scandal at the Parking Violations Bureau in 1986. That story was one of many that got him a Pulitzer Prize that year - "for columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.", according to the citation.
"He had a big ego, which you have to have if you think people should be interested in what you have to say, but he still had a big heart," former Newsday editor John Mancini said. "It allowed him to tell the biggest stories from the smallest details of people’s lives."
"He remained devoted to telling what he saw as the truth," said Michael Daly, also a former Daily News columnist. "He did not write to a particular audience. He did not pander or write to curry favor."
"Long before 9/11 showed America how great the average New Yorker was, Breslin was doing it on the pages of New York’s newspapers every day," Sen. Charles Schumer said on Twitter.
Although Breslin stopped producing a regular column years ago, his influence remained.
Glenn Thrush, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and former Newsday reporter, tweeted: "Not a day I walk into this White House without thinking ‘How the hell would Jimmy deal with these guys?’ "
Breslin, basking in the glow of his recent Pulitzer Prize: