"The puzzlement [&] terrible fear in his eyes. Because he knows, and everybody who has seen it knows, that it is over." Jimmy Breslin, 1965 pic.twitter.com/xzLAbTgb6I
— Joshua Zeitz (@JoshuaMZeitz) March 20, 2017
Jimmy Breslin describing a white cop observing an "old black woman with mud on her shoes" singing "we are not afraid," Montgomery, AL 1965. https://t.co/dNZMmFBHm6
— Joshua Zeitz (@JoshuaMZeitz) March 20, 2017
Jimmy Breslin was one of my NYC role models, when I was growing up. (The others that I remember were Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm.) The man was a storyteller, and a fighter. He knew that every businessman and most politicians were pathological liars (at least to themselves). He knew that even the worst tragedies were threaded with a vein of humor, and that even the funniest story had an undertone of tragedy. Most of all, he never truckled.
Kevin Cullen, in the Boston Globe, remembers “the greatest newspaper columnist ever”:
… Seven years ago, they had a big thing for Breslin at NYU in Greenwich Village. It was a cross between an Irish wake and “This Is Your Life” and we were all shocked that Breslin would actually venture out at night and go downtown and listen to people tell him how wonderful he is.
But Ronnie got him to go and he sat in a big puffy easy chair on a stage at NYU and rolled his eyes as everybody got up and told stories and suggested he was a nice person.
Gail Collins, the New York Times columnist, recalled the day that Breslin and his Daily News editor Sharon Rosenhause were screaming at each other in the newsroom. When Breslin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986, he stood up in the newsroom and announced, “This award actually belongs to Sharon Rosenhause, but I’m not speaking to her.”
Michael Daly, a columnist at the Daily News, remembered how Breslin took a taxi to cover the riots in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in 1991. Breslin never learned to drive. “Why would I?” he used to say. “I can get a taxi anywhere.” The taxi got torched, Breslin got beat up, and he wrote columns sympathetic to the people of Crown Heights, because he knew what it was like to be poor and ignored.
Dan Barry, a columnist at The Times who grew up reading and admiring Breslin, told of how when he was diagnosed with cancer, Breslin, who barely knew him, showed up at his side and walked with him across Manhattan and into Sloan-Kettering.
“He gave me the gift of distraction,” Dan Barry said.
And that was Breslin, to his core. He distracted us, from apathy. He made us care…
From the Washington Post:
Jimmy Breslin, long the gruff and rumpled king of streetwise New York newspaper columnists, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose muscular, unadorned prose pummeled the venal, deflated the pompous and gave voice to ordinary city-dwellers for decades, died March 19 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88…
For an “unlettered bum,” as Mr. Breslin called himself, he left an estimable legacy of published work, including 16 books, seven of them novels, plus two anthologies of his columns. What set him apart as a writer was the inimitable style of his journalism across the last great decades of ink-on-paper news, in the 1960s for the old New York Herald Tribune and later for the Daily News and the city pages of Long Island-based Newsday, where his final regular column appeared in 2004…