Page 30 - ARUBA TODAY

A30 PEOPLE & ARTS
Monday 20 March 2017
Jimmy Breslin, chronicler of wise guys and underdogs, dies

VERENA DOBNIK New Yorker, chronicling
Associated Press wise guys and big-city
NEW YORK (AP) — Jimmy power brokers but always
Breslin scored one of his coming back to the toils of
best-remembered inter- ordinary working people.
views with President John Breslin, who died Sunday
F. Kennedy’s grave-digger at 88, was a fixture for de-
and once drove straight cades in New York jour-
into a riot where he was nalism, notably with the
beaten to his underwear. New York Daily News, and
In a writing career that he won a Pulitzer Prize for
spanned six decades, the pieces that, among others,
columnist and author be- exposed police torture in
came the brash embodi- Queens and took a sympa-
ment of the street-smart thetic look at the life of an

In this Nov. 2, 2004, file photo, author-columnist Jimmy Breslin poses for a photo in his New York
apartment.
Associated Press
AIDS patient. he once boasted. “There’s was being raised by wom-
“His was the triumph of the never been anybody in my en, so life is more compli-
local, and to get the local league.” cated than a punch in the
right, you have to get how He was an acclaimed au- jaw.” In the 1980s, he won
people made a living, how thor, too. “The Gang that both the Pulitzer for com-
they got paid, how they Couldn’t Shoot Straight” mentary and the George
didn’t get paid, and to was his comic account of Polk Award for metropoli-
be able to bring it to life,” warring Brooklyn mobsters tan reporting. The Pulitzer
said Pete Hamill, another that was made into a 1971 committee noted that Bre-
famed New York columnist movie. “Damon Runyon: slin’s columns “consistently
who in the 1970s shared A Life” was an account of championed ordinary citi-
an office with Breslin at the another famous New York zens.” A few days after the
Daily News. “Jimmy really newsman, and “I Want to 2001 World Trade Center
admired people whose fa- Thank My Brain for Remem- attacks, he wrote of the
vorite four-letter word was bering Me” was a memoir. dwindling hopes for fami-
work,” said Hamill, speak- Breslin was “an intellectual lies. “The streets have been
ing from New Orleans. disguised as a barroom covered with pictures and
Breslin died at his Manhat- primitive,” wrote Jack New- posters of missing people,”
tan home of complications field and Wayne Barrett in he wrote. “The messages
from pneumonia, accord- their book “City for Sale.” on the posters begging for
ing to his stepdaughter, He acknowledged being help. Their wife could be in
Emily Eldridge. prone to fits of bad temper. a coma in a hospital. The
It was the rumpled Breslin After spewing ethnic slurs husband could be wan-
who mounted a quixotic at a Korean-American co- dering the street. Please
political campaign for city- worker in 1990, Breslin apol- look. My sister could have
wide office in the 1960s; ogized by writing, “I am no stumbled out of the wreck-
who became the Son of good and once again I age and taken to a hospi-
Sam’s regular correspon- can prove it.” tal that doesn’t know her.
dent in the 1970s; who But under the tough, bel- Help. Call if you see her. But
exposed the city’s worst ligerent personality was now it is the ninth day and
corruption scandal in de- someone else — a son the beautiful sad hope of
cades in the 1980s; who whose hard-drinking father the families seems more like
was pulled from a car and left home when he was 6 denial.” In other columns,
nearly stripped naked by to get a loaf of bread and Breslin presented an ar-
Brooklyn rioters in the 1990s. never returned, Hamill said. ray of recurring characters
With his uncombed mop of Breslin’s mother supported — Klein the Lawyer, Shelly
hair and sneering Queens the family by working as a the Bail Bondsman, Un Oc-
accent, Breslin was a con- welfare system administra- chio the mob boss. They
fessor and town crier and tor, raising the boy along seemed to blur the line be-
sometimes seemed like a with her two sisters. tween fact and fiction, until
character right out of his “The gruff personality was the first pair became key
own work. And he didn’t a mask a guy would don to figures in Breslin’s 1986 ex-
mind telling you. “I’m the get through the day,” Ha- clusive on the multimillion-
best person ever to have mill said. “Under the mask, dollar Parking Violations Bu-
a column in this business,” what you found at his core reau scandal.q